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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN &. CO. 



BACKLOG STUDIES 



BY 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 





BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1894 



T5 3I-S' 2 ' 



Copyright, 1872, 
By JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. 

Copyright, 1885 and 1894, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

First Study 1 

Second Study 22 

Third Study ,48 

Fourth Study 73 

Fifth Study 98 

Sixth Study . . . 128 

Seventh Study 155 

Eighth Study 169 

Ninth Study . 197 

Tenth Study 224 

Eleventh Study 241 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 



FIRST STUDY. 

►I. 

The fire on the hearth has almost gone 
out in New England ; the hearth has gone 
out ; the family has lost its centre ; age 
ceases to be respected ; sex is only distin- 
guished by the difference between millinery 
bills and tailors' bills ; there is no more 
toast - and - cider ; the young are not al- 
lowed to eat mince-pies at ten o'clock at 
night ; half a cheese is no longer set to toast 
before the fire ; you scarcely ever see in front 
of the coals a row of roasting apples, which 
a bright little girl, with many a dive and 
start, shielding her sunny face from the fire 
with one hand, turns from time to time ; 
scarce are the gray-haired sires who strop 
their razors on the family Bible, and doze 
in the chimney-corner. A good many things 
have gone out with the fire on the hearth. 



Z BACKLOG STUDIES. 

I do not mean to say that public and pri- 
vate morality have vanished with the hearth. 
A good degree of purity and considerable 
happiness are possible with grates and blow- 
ers ; it is a day of trial, when we are all pass- 
ing through a fiery furnace, and very likely 
we shall be purified as we are dried up and 
wasted away. Of course the family is gone, 
as an institution, though there still are at- 
tempts to bring up a family round a " reg- 
ister." But you might just as well try to 
bring it up by hand, as without the rallying- 
point of a hearthstone. Are there any home- 
steads nowadays ? Do people hesitate to 
change houses any more than they do to 
change their clothes ? People hire houses 
as they would a masquerade costume, liking, 
sometimes, to appear for a year in a little 
fictitious stone - front splendor above their 
means. Thus it happens that so many 
people live in houses that do not fit them. 
I should almost as soon think of wearing an- 
other person's clothes as his house ; unless I 
could let it out and take it in until it fitted, 
and somehow expressed my own character 
and taste. But we have fallen into the days 
of conformity. It is no wonder that people 
constantly go into their neighbors' houses by 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 3 

mistake, just as, in spite of the Maine law, 
they wear away each other's hats from an 
evening party. It has almost come to this, 
that you might as well be anybody else as 
yourself. 

Am I mistaken in supposing that this is 
owing to the discontinuance of big chimneys, 
with wide fireplaces in them ? How can a 
person be attached to a house that has no 
centre of attraction, no soul in it, in the vis- 
ible form of a glowing fire and a warm chim- 
ney, like the heart in the body ? When you 
think of the old homestead, if you ever do, 
your thoughts go straight to the wide chim- 
ney and its burning logs. No wonder that 
you are ready to move from one fireplaceless 
house into another. But you have something 
just as good, you say. Yes, I have heard of 
it. This age, which imitates everything, even 
to the virtues of our ancestors, has invented 
a fireplace, with artificial, iron, or composi- 
tion logs in it, hacked and painted, in which 
gas is burned, so that it has the appearance 
of a wood fire. This seems to me blasphemy. 
Do you think a cat would lie down before it ? 
Can you poke it ? If you can't poke it, it is 
a fraud. To poke a wood fire is more solid 
enjoyment than almost anything else in the 



4 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

world. The crowning human virtue in a 
man is to let his wife poke the fire. I do 
not know how any virtue whatever is pos- 
sible over an imitation gas log. What a 
sense of insincerity the family must have, if 
they indulge in the hypocrisy of gathering 
about it ! With this centre of untruthful- 
ness, what must the life in the family be ? 
Perhaps the father will be living at the rate 
of ten thousand a year on a salary of four 
thousand ; perhaps the mother, more beauti- 
ful and younger than her beautified daugh- 
ters, will rouge ; perhaps the young ladies 
will make wax-work. A cynic might sug- 
gest as the motto of modern life this sim- 
ple legend, " Just as good as the real." But 
I am not a cynic, and I hope for the re- 
kindling of wood fires, and a return of the 
beautiful home light from them. If a wood 
fire is a luxury, it is cheaper than many 
in which we indulge without thought, and 
cheaper than the visits of a doctor, made 
necessary by the want of ventilation of the 
house. Not that I have anything against 
doctors ; I only wish, after they have been 
to see us in a way that seems so friendly, 
they had nothing against us. 

My fireplace, which is deep, and nearly 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 5 

three feet wide, has a broad hearthstone in 
front of it, where the live coals tumble down, 
and a pair of gigantic brass andirons. The 
brasses are burnished, and shine cheerfully 
in the firelight, and on either side stand tall 
shovel and tongs, like sentries, mounted in 
brass. The tongs, like the two-handed sword 
of Bruce, cannot be wielded by puny people. 
We burn in it hickory wood, cut long. We 
like the smell of this aromatic forest timber, 
and its clear flame. The birch is also a sweet 
wood for the hearth, with a sort of spiritual 
flame and an even temper, — no snappish- 
ness. Some prefer the elm, which holds fire 
so well ; and I have a neighbor who uses 
nothing but apple-tree wood, — a solid, fam- 
ily sort of wood, fragrant also, and full of 
delightful suggestions. But few people can 
afford to burn up their fruit-trees. I should 
as soon think of lighting the fire with sweet- 
oil that comes in those graceful wicker-bound 
flasks from Naples, or with manuscript ser- 
mons, which, however, do not burn well, be 
they never so dry, — not half so well as 
printed editorials. 

Few people know how to make a wood fire, 
but everybody thinks he or she does. You 
want, first, a large backlog, which does not 



6 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

rest on the andirons. This will keep your 
fire forward, radiate heat all day, and late 
in the evening fall into a ruin of glowing 
coals, like the last days of a good man, 
whose life is the richest and most beneficent 
at the close, when the flames of passion and 
the sap of youth are burned out, and there 
only remain the solid, bright elements of 
character. Then you want a forestick on 
the andirons ; and upon these build the fire 
of lighter stuff. In this way you have at 
once a cheerful blaze, and the fire gradually 
eats into the solid mass, sinking down with 
increasing fervor ; coals drop below, and del- 
icate tongues of flame sport along the beauti- 
ful grain of the forestick. There are people 
who kindle a fire underneath. But these are 
conceited people, who are wedded to their 
own way. I suppose an accomplished incen- 
diary always starts a fire in the attic, if he 
can. I am not an incendiary, but I hate 
bigotry. I don't call those incendiaries very 
good Christians who, when they set fire to the 
martyrs, touched off the fagots at the bottom, 
so as to make them go slow. Besides, knowl- 
edge works down easier than it does up. 
Education must proceed from the more en- 
lightened down to the more ignorant strata. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 7 

If you want better common schools, raise the 
standard of the colleges, and so on. Build 
your fire on top. Let your light shine. I 
have seen people build a fire under a balky 
horse ; but he would n't go ; he 'd be a horse- 
martyr first. A fire kindled under one never 
did him any good. Of course you can make 
a fire on the hearth by kindling it under- 
neath, but that does not make it right. I 
want my hearth-fire to be an emblem of the 
best things. 

H. 

It must be confessed that a wood fire 
needs as much tending as a pair of twins. 
To say nothing of fiery projectiles sent into 
the room, even by the best wood, from the 
explosion of gases confined in its cells, the 
brands are continually dropping down, and 
coals are being scattered over the hearth. 
However much a careful housewife, who 
thinks more of neatness than enjoyment, 
may dislike this, it is one of the chief de- 
lights of a wood fire. I would as soon have 
an Englishman without side-whiskers as a 
fire without a big backlog ; and I would 
rather have no fire than one that required 
no tending, — one of dead wood that could 



8 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

not sing again the imprisoned songs of the 
forest, or give out in brilliant scintillations 
the sunshine it absorbed in its growth. 
Flame is an ethereal sprite, and the spice of 
danger in it gives zest to the care of the 
hearth-fire. Nothing is so beautiful as spring- 
ing, changing flame, — it was the last freak 
of the Gothic architecture men to represent 
the fronts of elaborate edifices of stone as 
on fire, by the kindling flamboyant devices. 
A fireplace is, besides, a private laboratory, 
where one can witness the most brilliant 
chemical experiments, minor conflagrations 
only wanting the grandeur of cities on fire. 
It is a vulgar notion that a fire is only for 
heat. A chief value of it is, however, to 
look at. It is a picture, framed between the 
jambs. You have nothing on your walls, 
by the best masters (the poor masters are 
not, however, represented) that is really so 
fascinating, so spiritual. Speaking like an 
upholsterer, it furnishes the room. And it 
is never twice the same. In this respect it 
is like the landscape- view through a window, 
always seen in a new light, color, or condi- 
tion. The fireplace is a window into the 
most charming world I ever had a glimpse 
of. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 9 

Yet direct heat is an agreeable sensation. 
I am not scientific enough to despise it, and 
have no taste for a winter residence on 
Mount Washington, where the thermometer 
cannot be kept comfortable even by boiling. 
They say that they say in Boston that there 
is a satisfaction in being well dressed which 
religion cannot give. There is certainly a 
satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hick- 
ory fire which is not to be found in the fier- 
iest blasts of a furnace. The hot air of a 
furnace is a sirocco ; the heat of a wood fire 
is only intense sunshine, like that bottled in 
LacrimaB Christi. Besides this, the eye is 
delighted, the sense of smell is regaled by 
the fragrant decomposition, and the ear is 
pleased with the hissing, crackling, and sing- 
ing, — a liberation of so many out-door 
noises. Some people like the sound of bub- 
bling in a boiling pot, or the fizzing of a 
frying-spider. But there is nothing gross in 
the animated crackling of sticks of wood 
blazing on the hearth ; not even if chestnuts 
are roasting in the ashes. All the senses 
are ministered to, and the imagination is left 
as free as the leaping tongues of flame. 

The attention which a wood fire demands 
is one of its best recommendations. We 



10 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

value little that which costs us no trouble to 
maintain. If we had to keep the sun kin- 
dled up and going by private corporate ac- 
tion or act of Congress, and to be taxed for 
the support of customs officers of solar heat, 
we should prize it more than we do. Not 
that I should like to look upon the sun as a 
job, and have the proper regulation of its 
temperature get into politics, where we al- 
ready have so much combustible stuff ; but 
we take it quite too much as a matter, of 
course, and, having it free, do not reckon it 
among the reasons for gratitude. Many 
people shut it out of their houses as if it 
were an enemy, watch its descent upon the 
carpet as if it were only a thief of color, and 
plant trees to shut it away from the moul- 
dering house. All the animals know better 
than this, as well as the more simple races 
of men ; the old women of the southern Ital- 
ian coasts sit all day in the sun and ply the 
distaff, as grateful as the sociable hens on 
the south side of a New England barn ; the 
slow tortoise likes to take the sun upon his 
sloping back, soaking in color that shall 
make him immortal when the imperishable 
part of him is cut up into shell ornaments. 
The capacity of a cat to absorb sunshine is 



BACKLOG STUDIES. H 

only equalled by that of an Arab or an Ethi- 
opian. They are not afraid of injuring their 
complexions. White must be the color of 
civilization ; it has so many natural disad- 
vantages. But this is politics. I was about 
to say that, however it may be with sun- 
shine, one is always grateful for his wood 
fire, because he does not maintain it without 
some cost. 

Yet I cannot but confess to a difference 
between sunlight and the light of a wood 
fire. The sunshine is entirely untamed. 
Where it rages most freely it tends to evoke 
the brilliancy rather than the harmonious sat- 
isfactions of nature. The monstrous growths 
and the flaming colors of the tropics con- 
trast with our more subdued loveliness of 
foliage and bloom. The birds of the middle 
region dazzle with their contrasts of plu- 
mage, and their voices are for screaming 
rather than singing. I presume the new ex- 
periments in sound would project a macaw's 
voice in very tangled and inharmonious lines 
of light. I suspect that the fiercest sunlight 
puts people, as well as animals and vegeta- 
bles, on extremes in all ways. A wood fire 
on the hearth is a kindler of the domestic 
virtues. It brings in cheerfulness and a 



12 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

family centre, and, besides, it is artistic. I 
should like to know if an artist could ever 
represent on canvas a happy family gath- 
ered round a hole in the floor called a reg- 
ister. Given a fireplace, and a tolerable ar- 
tist could almost create a pleasant family 
round it. But what could he conjure out of 
a register ? If there was any virtue among 
our ancestors, — and they labored under a 
great many disadvantages, and had few of 
the aids which we have to excellence of life, 
— I am convinced they drew it mostly from 
the fireside. If it was difficult to read the 
eleven commandments by the light of a pine- 
knot, it was not difficult to get the sweet 
spirit of them from the countenance of the 
serene mother knitting in the chimney-cor- 
ner. 

III. 

When the fire is made, you want to sit in 
front of it and grow genial in its effulgence. 
I have never been upon a throne, — except 
in moments of a traveller's curiosity, about 
as long as a South American dictator re- 
mains on one, — but I have no idea that 
it compares, for pleasantness, with a seat 
before a wood fire. A whole leisure day 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 13 

before you, a good novel in hand, and the 
backlog only just beginning to kindle, with 
uncounted hours of comfort in it, — has life 
anything more delicious ? For " novel " you 
can substitute " Calvin's Institutes," if you 
wish to be virtuous as well as happy. Even 
Calvin would melt before a wood fire. A 
great snow-storm, visible on three sides of 
your wide-windowed room, loading the ever- 
greens, blown in fine powder from the great 
chestnut-tops, piled up in ever-accumulating 
masses, covering the paths, the shrubbery, 
the hedges, drifting and clinging in fantastic 
deposits, deepening your sense of security, 
and taking away the sin of idleness by mak- 
ing it a necessity, — this is an excellent 
background to your day by the fire. 

To deliberately sit down in the morning 
to read a novel, to enjoy yourself, is this not, 
in New England (I am told they don't read 
much in other parts of the country), the sin 
of sins? Have you any right to read, es- 
pecially novels, until you have exhausted the 
best part of the day in some employment 
that is called practical ? Have you any right 
to enjoy yourself at all until the fag end of 
the day, when you are tired and incapable 
of enjoying yourself ? I am aware that this 



14 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

is the practice, if not the theory, of our so- 
ciety, — to postpone the delights of social 
intercourse until after dark, and rather late 
at night, when body and mind are both weary 
with the exertions of business, and when we 
can give to what is the most delightful and 
profitable thing in life, social and intellec- 
tual society, only the weariness of dull brains 
and over-tired muscles. No wonder we take 
our amusements sadly, and that so many 
people find dinners heavy and parties stupid. 
Our economy leaves no place for amuse- 
ments ; we merely add them to the burden 
of a life already full. The world is still a 
little off the track as to what is really useful. 
I confess that the morning is a very good 
time to read a novel, or anything else which 
is good, and requires a fresh mind ; and I 
take it that nothing is worth reading that 
does not require an alert mind. I suppose 
it is necessary that business should be trans- 
acted; though the amount of business that 
does not contribute to anybody's comfort or 
improvement suggests the query whether it 
is not overdone. I know that unremitting 
attention to business is the price of success, 
but I don't know what success is. There is 
a man, whom we all know, who built a house 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 15 

that cost a quarter of a million of dollars, and 
furnished it for another like sum, who does 
not know anything more about architecture, 
or painting, or books, or history, than he 
cares for the rights of those who have not so 
much money as he has. I heard him once, 
in a foreign gallery, say to his wife, as they 
stood in front of a famous picture by Ru- 
bens : " That is the Rape of the Sardines ! " 
What a cheerful world it would be if every- 
body was as successful as that man ! While 
I am reading my book by the fire, and tak- 
ing an active part in important transactions 
that may be a good deal better than real, let 
me be thankful that a great many men are 
profitably employed in offices and bureaus 
and country stores in keeping up the gossip 
and endless exchange of opinions among 
mankind, so much of which is made to ap- 
pear to the women at home as " business." 
I find that there is a sort of busy idleness 
among men in this world that is not held in 
disrepute. When the time comes that I 
have to prove my right to vote, with women, 
I trust that it will be remembered in my 
favor that I made this admission. If it is 
true, as a witty conservative once said to me, 
that we never shall have peace in this coun- 



16 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

try until we elect a colored woman presi- 
dent, I desire to be rectus in curia early. 



IV. 

The fireplace, as we said, is a window 
through which we look out upon other scenes. 
We like to read of the small, bare room, 
with cobwebbed ceiling and narrow window, 
in which the poor child of genius sits with 
his magical pen, the master of a realm of 
beauty and enchantment. I think the open 
fire does not kindle the imagination so much 
as it awakens the memory ; one sees the 
past in its crumbling embers and ashy gray- 
ness, rather than the future. People become 
reminiscent and even sentimental in front of 
it. They used to become something else in 
those good old days when it was thought 
best to heat the poker red hot before plung- 
ing it into the mugs of flip. This heating 
of the poker has been disapproved of late 
years, but I do not know on what grounds ; 
if one is to drink bitters and gins and the 
like, such as I understand as good people as 
clergymen and women take in private, and 
by advice, I do not know why one should 
not make them palatable and heat them with 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 17 

his own poker. Cold whiskey out of a bot- 
tle, taken as a prescription six times a day 
on the sly, is n't my idea of virtue any more 
than the social ancestral glass, sizzling wick- 
edly with the hot iron. Names are so con- 
fusing in this world ; but things are apt to 
remain pretty much the same, whatever we 
call them. 

Perhaps as you look into the fireplace it 
widens and grows deep and cavernous. The 
back and the jambs are built up of great 
stones, not always smoothly laid, with jutting 
ledges upon which ashes are apt to lie. The 
hearthstone is an enormous block of trap 
rock, with a surface not perfectly even, but 
a capital place to crack butternuts on. Over 
the fire swings an iron crane, with a row of 
pot-hooks of all lengths hanging from it. It 
swings out when the housewife wants to 
hang on the tea-kettle, and it is strong 
enough to support a row of pots, or a mam- 
moth caldron kettle on occasion. What a 
jolly sight is this fireplace when the pots and 
kettles in a row are all boiling and bubbling 
over the flame, and a roasting-spit is turning 
in front ! It makes a person as hungry as 
one of Scott's novels. But the brilliant sight 
is in the frosty morning, about daylight, when 



18 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the fire is made. The coals are raked open, 
the split sticks are piled up in open-work 
criss-crossing, as high as the crane ; and 
when the flame catches hold and roars up 
through the interstices, it is like an out-of- 
door bonfire. Wood enough is consumed in 
that morning sacrifice to cook the food of a 
Parisian family for a year. How it roars 
up the wide chimney, sending into the air 
the signal smoke and sparks which announce 
to the farming neighbors another day cheer- 
fully begun ! t The sleepiest boy in the world 
would get up in his red flannel nightgown to 
see such a fire lighted, even if he dropped to 
sleep again in his chair before the ruddy 
blaze. Then it is that the house, which has 
shrunk and creaked all night in the pinch- 
ing cold of winter, begins to glow again and 
come to life. The thick frost melts little by 
little on the small window-panes, and it is 
seen that the gray dawn is breaking over 
the leagues of pallid snow. It is time to 
blow out the candle, which has lost all its 
cheerfulness in the light of day. The morn- 
ing romance is over ; the family is astir ; 
and member after member appears with the 
morning yawn, to stand before the crackling, 
fierce conflagration. The daily round be* 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 19 

gins. The most hateful employment ever 
invented for mortal man presents itself : the 
" chores " are to be done. The boy who ex- 
pects every morning to open into a new 
world finds that to-day is like yesterday, but 
he believes to-morrow will be different. And 
yet enough for him, for the day, is the wad- 
ing in the snow-drifts, or the sliding on the 
diamond-sparkling crust. Happy, too, is he, 
when the storm rages, and the snow is piled 
high against the windows, if he can sit in 
the warm chimney-corner and read about 
Burgoyne, and General Eraser, and Miss 
McCrea, midwinter marches through the wil- 
derness, surprises of wigwams, and the stir- 
ring ballad, say, of the Battle of the Kegs : — 

" Come, gallants, attend and list a friend 
Thrill forth harmonious ditty ; 
While I shall tell what late befell 
At Philadelphia city." 

I should like to know what heroism a boy 
in an old New England farm-house — rough- 
nursed by nature, and fed on the traditions 
of the old wars — did not aspire to. " John," 
says the mother, " you ']1 burn your head to 
a crisp in that heat." But John does not 
hear ; he is storming the Plains of Abraham 
just now. " Johnny, dear, bring in a stick 



20 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

of wood." How can Johnny bring in wood 
when he is in that defile with Braddock, and 
the Indians are popping at him from behind 
every tree ? There is something about a 
boy that I like, after all. 

The fire rests upon the broad hearth, the 
hearth rests upon a great substruction of 
stone, and the substruction rests upon the 
cellar. What supports the cellar I never 
knew, but the cellar supports the family. 
The cellar is the foundation of domestic 
comfort. Into its dark, cavernous recesses 
the child's imagination fearfully goes. Bo- 
gies guard the bins of choicest apples. I 
know not what comical sprites sit astride 
the cider-barrels ranged along the walls. 
The feeble flicker of the tallow-candle does 
not at all dispel, but creates, illusions, and 
magnifies all the rich possibilities of this un- 
derground treasure-house. When the cellar- 
door is opened, and the boy begins to de- 
scend into the thick darkness, it is always 
with a heart-beat as of one started upon some 
adventure. Who can forget the smell that 
comes through the opened door ? — a min- 
gling of fresh earth, fruit exhaling delicious 
aroma, kitchen vegetables, the mouldy odor 
of barrels, a sort of ancestral air, — as if a 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 21 

door had been opened into an old romance. 
Do you like it? Not much. But then I 
would not exchange the remembrance of it 
^or a good many odors and perfumes that I 
do like. 

It is time to punch the backlog and put 
on a new forestick. 



SECOND STUDY. 

1. 

The log was white birch. The beautiful 
satin bark at once kindled into a soft, pure, 
but brilliant flame, something like that of 
naphtha. There is no other wood flame so 
rich, and it leaps up in a joyous, spiritual 
way, as if glad to burn for the sake of burn- 
ing. Burning like a clear oil, it has none 
of the heaviness and fatness of the pine and 
the balsam. Woodsmen are at a loss to ac- 
count for its intense and yet chaste flame, 
since the bark has no oily appearance. The 
heat from it is fierce, and the light dazzling. 
It flares up eagerly like young love, and 
then dies away ; the wood does not keep up 
the promise of the bark. The woodsmen, it 
is proper to say, have not considered it in its 
relation to young love. In the remote set- 
tlements the pine-knot is still the torch of 
courtship ; it endures to sit up by. The 
birch-bark has alliances with the world of 
sentiment and of letters. The most poetical 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 23 

reputation of the North American Indian 
floats in a canoe made of it ; his picture- 
writing was inscribed on it. It is the paper 
that nature furnishes for lovers in the wil- 
derness, who are enabled to convey a delicate 
sentiment by its use, which is expressed 
neither in their ideas nor chirography. It 
is inadequate for legal parchment, but does 
very well for deeds of love, which are not 
meant usually to give a perfect title. With 
care, it may be split into sheets as thin as 
the Chinese paper. It is so beautiful to 
handle that it is a pity civilization cannot 
make more use of it. But fancy articles 
manufactured from it are very much like all 
ornamental work made of nature's perish- 
able seeds, leaves, cones, and dry twigs, — 
exquisite while the pretty fingers are fash- 
ioning it, but soon growing shabby and 
cheap to the eye. And yet there is a pathos 
in "dried things," whether they are dis- 
played as ornaments in some secluded home, 
or hidden religiously in bureau-drawers, 
where profane eyes cannot see how white 
ties are growing yellow and ink is fading 
from treasured letters, amid a faint and dis- 
couraging perfume of ancient rose-leaves. 
The birch log holds out very well while it 



24 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

is green, but has not substance enough for a 
backlog when dry. Seasoning green timber 
or men is always an experiment. A man 
may do very well in a simple, let us say, 
country or backwoods line of life, who would 
come to nothing in a more complicated civil- 
ization. City life is a severe trial. One 
man is struck with a dry-rot; another de- 
velops season-cracks ; another shrinks and 
swells with every change of circumstance. 
Prosperity is said to be more trying than ad- 
versity, a theory which most people are will- 
ing to accept without trial ; but few men 
stand the drying out of the natural sap of 
their greenness in the artificial heat of city 
life. This, be it noticed, is nothing against 
the drying and seasoning process ; character 
must be put into the crucible some time, and 
why not in this world ? A man who cannot 
stand seasoning will not have a high market 
value in any part of the universe. It is 
creditable to the race that so many men and 
women bravely jump into the furnace of 
prosperity and expose themselves to the dry- 
ing influences of city life. 

The first fire that is lighted on the hearth 
in the autumn seems to bring out the cold 
weather. Deceived by the placid appear- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 25 

ance of the dying year, the softness of the 
sky, and the warm color of foliage, we have 
been shivering about for days without ex- 
actly comprehending what was the matter. 
The open fire at once sets up a standard of 
comparison. We find that the advance 
guards of winter are besieging the house. 
The cold rushes in at every crack of door 
and window, apparently signalled by the 
flame to invade the house and fill it with 
chilly drafts and sarcasms on what we call 
the temperate zone. It needs a roaring fire 
to beat back the enemy ; a feeble one is only 
an invitation to the most insulting demon- 
strations. Our pious New England ances- 
tors were philosophers in their way. It was 
not simply owing to grace that they sat for 
hours in their barn-like meeting-houses dur- 
ing the winter Sundays, the thermometer 
many degrees below freezing, with no fire, 
except the zeal in their own hearts, — a con- 
gregation of red noses and bright eyes. It 
was no wonder that the minister in the pul- 
pit warmed up to his subject, cried aloud, 
used hot words, spoke a good deal of the hot 
place and the Person whose presence was a 
burning shame, hammered the desk as if he 
expected to drive his text through a two-inch 



26 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

plank, and lieated himself by all allowable 
ecclesiastical gymnastics. A few of their 
followers in our day seem to forget that our 
modern churches are heated by furnaces and 
supplied with gas. In the old days it would 
have been thought unphilosophic as well as 
effeminate to warm the meeting-houses arti- 
ficially. In one house I knew, at least, when 
it was proposed to introduce a stove to take 
a little of the chill from the Sunday services, 
the deacons protested against the innovation. 
They said that the stove might benefit those 
who sat close to it, but it would drive all the 
cold air to the other parts of the church, 
and freeze the people to death ; it was cold 
enough now around the edges. Blessed days 
of ignorance and upright living ! Sturdy 
men who served God by resolutely sitting 
out the icy hours of service, amid the rat- 
tling of windows and the carousal of winter 
in the high, wind-swept galleries ! Patient 
women, waiting in the chilly house for con- 
sumption to pick out his victims, and replace 
the color of youth and the flush of devotion 
with the hectic of disease ! At least, you 
did not doze arid droop in our overheated 
edifices, and die of vitiated air and disre- 
gard of the simplest conditions of organized 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 27 

life. It is fortunate that each generation 
does not comprehend its own ignorance. 
We are thus enabled to call our ancestors 
barbarous. It is something also that each 
age has its choice of the death it will die. 
Our generation is most ingenious. From 
our public assembly-rooms and houses we 
have almost succeeded in excluding pure air. 
It took the race ages to build dwellings that 
would keep out rain ; it has taken longer to 
build houses air-tight, but we are on the eve 
of success. We are only foiled by the ill- 
fitting, insincere work of the builders, who 
build for a day, and charge for all time. 



II. 

When the fire on the hearth has blazed 
up and then settled into steady radiance, 
talk begins. There is no place like the 
chimney-corner for confidences ; for picking 
up the clews of an old friendship ; for tak- 
ing note where one's self has drifted, by 
comparing ideas and prejudices with the in- 
timate friend of years ago, whose course in 
life has lain apart from yours. No stranger 
puzzles you so much as the once close friend, 
with whose thinking and associates you have 



28 , BACKLOG STUDIES. 

for years been unfamiliar. Life has come 
to mean this and that to you ; you have 
fallen into certain habits of thought; for 
you the world has progressed in this or that 
direction; of certain results you feel very 
sure; you have fallen into harmony with 
your surroundings ; you meet day after day 
people interested in the things that interest 
you ; you are not in the least opinionated : it 
is simply your good fortune to look upon the 
affairs of the world from the right point of 
view. When you last saw your friend, — 
less than a year after you left college, — he 
was the most sensible and agreeable of men ; 
he had no heterodox notions ; he agreed with 
you ; you could even tell what sort of a wife 
he would select, and if you could do that 
you held the key to his life. 

Well, Herbert came to visit me the other 
day from the antipodes. And here he sits 
by the fireplace. I cannot think of any one 
I would rather see there, — except perhaps 
Thackeray ; or, for entertainment, Boswell ; 
or old Pepys ; or one of the people who was 
left out of the Ark. They were talking one 
foggy London night at Hazlitt's about whom 
they would most like to have seen, when 
Charles Lamb startled the company by de» 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 29 

claring that he would rather have seen Judas 
Iscariot than any other person who had lived 
on the earth. For myself, I would rather 
have seen Lamb himself once than to have 
lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great de- 
light, has not changed ; I should know him 
anywhere, — the same serious, contempla- 
tive face, with lurking humor at the corners 
of the mouth, — the same cheery laugh and 
clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There 
is nothing so winning as a good voice. To 
see Herbert again, unchanged in all outward 
essentials, is not only gratifying, but valu- 
able as a testimony to nature's success in 
holding on to a personal identity, through 
the entire change of matter that had been 
constantly taking place for so many years. 
I know very well there is here no part of 
the Herbert whose hand I had shaken at the 
Commencement parting ; but it is an aston- 
ishing reproduction of him, — a material 
likeness ; and now for the spiritual. 

Such a wide chance for divergence in the 
spiritual. It has been such a busy world 
for twenty years. So many things have 
been torn up by the roots again that were 
settled when we left college. There were to 
be no more wars ; democracy was democ* 



30 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

racy, and progress, the differentiation of the 
individual, was a mere question of clothes ; 
if you want to be different, go to your tai- 
lor ; nobody had demonstrated that there is 
a man-soul, and a woman-soul, and that each 
is in reality only a half -soul, — putting the 
race, so to speak, upon the half-shell. The 
social oyster being opened, there appears to 
be two shells and only one oyster ; who shall 
have it ? So many new canons of taste, of 
criticism, of morality, have been set up; 
there has been such a resurrection of his- 
torical reputations for new judgment, and 
there have been so many discoveries, geo- 
graphical, archaeological, geological, biolog- 
ical, that the earth is not at all what it was 
supposed to be ; and our philosophers are 
much more anxious to ascertain where we 
came from than whither we are going. In 
this whirl and turmoil of new ideas, Nature, 
which has only the single end of maintaining 
the physical identity in the body, works on 
undisturbed, replacing particle for particle, 
and preserving the likeness more skilfully 
than a mosaic artist in the Vatican ; she has 
not even her materials sorted and labelled, 
as the Roman artist has his thousands of 
bits of color ; and man is all the while doing 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 31 

his best to confuse the process, by changing 
his climate, his diet, all his surroundings, 
without the least care to remain himself. 
But the mind ? 

It is more difficult to get acquainted with 
Herbert than with an entire stranger, for I 
have my prepossessions about him, and do 
not find him in so many places where I ex- 
pect to find him. He is full of criticism of 
the authors I admire ; he thinks stupid or 
improper the books I most read ; he is scep- 
tical about the " movements " I am inter- 
ested in ; he has formed very different opin- 
ions from mine concerning a hundred men 
and women of the present day ; we used to 
eat from one dish ; we could n't now find 
anything in common in a dozen ; his preju- 
dices (as we call our opinions) are most ex- 
traordinary, and not half so reasonable as 
my prejudices ; there are a great many per- 
sons and things that I am accustomed to de- 
nounce, uncontradicted by anybody, which 
he defends ; his public opinion is not at all 
my ^public opinion. I am sorry for him. 
He appears to have fallen into influences 
and among a set of people foreign to me. 
I find that his church has a different steeple 
on it from my church (which, to say the 



32 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

truth, has n't any). It is a pity that such a 
dear friend and a man of so much promise 
should have drifted off into such general 
contrariness. I see Herbert sitting here by 
the fire, with the old look in his face coming 
out more and more, but I do not recognize 
any features of his mind, — except perhaps 
his contrariness ; yes, he was always a little 
contrary, I think. And finally he surprised 
me with, " Well, my friend, you seem to 
have drifted away from your old notions and 
opinions. We used to agree when we were 
together, but I sometimes wondered where 
you would land ; for, pardon me, you showed 
signs of looking at things a little contrary." 

I am silent for a good while. I am trying 
to think who I am. There was a person 
whom I thought I knew, very fond of Her- 
bert, and agreeing with him in most things. 
Where has he gone? and, if he is here, 
where is the Herbert that I knew? 

If his intellectual and moral sympathies 
have all changed, I wonder if his physical 
tastes remain, like his appearance, the same. 
There has come over this country within the 
last generation, as everybody knows, a great 
wave of condemnation of pie. It has taken 
the character of a " movement," though we 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 33 

have had no conventions about it, nor is any 
one, of any of the several sexes among us, 
running for president against it. It is safe 
almost anywhere to denounce pie, yet nearly 
everybody eats it on occasion. A great 
many people think it savors of a life abroad 
to speak with horror of pie, although they 
were very likely the foremost of the Ameri- 
cans in Paris who used to speak with more 
enthusiasm of the American pie at Madame 
Busque's than of the Yenus of Milo. To 
talk against pie and still eat it is snobbish, 
of course ; but snobbery, being an aspiring 
failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better 
things. To affect dislike of pie is something. 
We have no statistics on the subject, and 
cannot tell whether it is gaining or losing in 
the country at large. Its disappearance in 
select circles is no test. The amount of 
writing against it is no more test of its des- 
uetude than the number of religious tracts 
distributed in a given district is a criterion 
of its piety. We are apt to assume that 
certain regions are substantially free of it. 
Herbert and I, travelling north one summer, 
fancied that we could draw in New England 
a sort of diet line, like the sweeping curves 
on the isothermal charts, which should show 



34 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

at least the leading pie sections. Journey- 
ing towards the White Mountains, we con- 
cluded that a line passing through Bellows 
Falls, and bending a little south on either 
side, would mark northward the region of 
perpetual pie. In this region pie is to be 
found at all hours and seasons, and at every 
meal. I am not sure, however, that pie is 
not a matter of altitude rather than latitude, 
as I find that all the hill and country towns 
of New England are full of those excellent 
women, the very salt of the housekeeping 
earth, who would feel ready to sink in morti- 
fication through their scoured kitchen floors, 
if visitors should catch them without a pie 
in the house. The absence of pie would be 
more noticed than a scarcity of Bible, even. 
Without it the housekeepers are as distract- 
ed as the boarding-house keeper, who de- 
clared that if it were not for canned tomato 
she should have nothing to fly to. Well, in 
all this great agitation I find Herbert un- 
moved, a conservative, even to the under- 
crust. I dare not ask him if he eats pie at 
breakfast. There are some tests that the 
dearest friendship may not apply. 

" Will you smoke ? " I ask. 

" No, I have reformed." 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 35 

" Yes, of course." 

" The fact is that when we consider the 
correlation of forces, the apparent sympathy 
of spirit manifestations with electric condi- 
tions, the almost revealed mysteries of what 
may be called the odic force, and the relation 
of all these phenomena to the nervous system 
in man, it is not safe to do anything to the 
nervous system that will " — 

" Hang the nervous system ! Herbert, we 
can agree in one thing ; old memories, rev- 
eries, friendships, centre about that : is n't 
an open wood fire good ? " 

" Yes," says Herbert, combatively, " if you 
don't sit before it too long." 

III. 

The best talk is that which escapes up the 
open chimney and cannot be repeated. The 
finest woods make the best fire and pass 
away with the least residuum. I hope the 
next generation will not accept the reports 
of " interviews " as specimens of the conver- 
sations of these years of grace. 

But do we talk as well as our fathers and 
mothers did ? We hear wonderful stories of 
the bright generation that sat about the wide 



36 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

fireplaces of New England. Good talk has 
so much short-hand that it cannot be re- 
ported, — the inflection, the change of voice, 
the shrug, cannot be caught on paper. The 
best of it is when the subject unexpectedly 
goes cross-lots, by a flash of short-cut, to a 
conclusion so suddenly revealed that it has 
the effect of wit. It needs the highest cul- 
ture and the finest breeding to prevent the 
conversation from running into mere persi- 
flage on the one hand — its common fate — 
or monologue on the other. Our conversa- 
tion is largely chaff. I am not sure but the 
former generation preached a good deal, but 
it had great practice in fireside talk, and 
must have talked well. There were narra- 
tors in those days who could charm a circle 
all the evening long with stories. When 
each day brought comparatively little new 
to read, there was leisure for talk, and the 
rare book and the infrequent magazine were 
thoroughly discussed. Families now are 
swamped by the printed matter that comes 
daily upon the centre-table. There must be 
a division of labor, one reading this, and 
another that, to make any impression on it. 
The telegraph brings the only common food, 
and works this daily miracle, that every 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 37 

mind in Christendom is excited by one topic 
simultaneously with every other mind ; it 
enables a concurrent mental action, a burst 
of sympathy, or a universal prayer to be 
made, which must be, if we have any faith 
in the immaterial left, one of the chief forces 
in modern life. It is fit that an agent so 
subtle as electricity should be the minister 
of it. 

When there is so much to read, there is 
little time for conversation ; nor is there 
leisure for another pastime of the ancient 
firesides, called reading aloud. The listen- 
ers, who heard while they looked into the 
wide chimney-place, saw there pass in stately 
procession the events and the grand persons 
of history, were kindled with the delights of 
travel, touched by the romance of true love, 
or made restless by tales of adventure ; — 
the hearth became a sort of magic stone that 
could transport those who sat by it to the 
most distant places and times, as soon as 
the book was opened and the reader began, 
of a winter's night. Perhaps the Puritan 
reader read through his nose, and all the lit- 
tle Puritans made the most dreadful nasal 
inquiries as the entertainment went on. The 
prominent nose of the intellectual New Eng- 



38 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

lander is evidence of the constant linguistic 
exercise of the organ for generations. It 
grew by talking through. But I have no 
doubt that practice made good readers in 
those days. Good reading aloud is almost 
a lost accomplishment now. It is little 
thought of in the schools. It is disused at 
home. It is rare to find any one who can 
read, even from the newspaper, well. Read- 
ing is so universal, even with the unculti- 
vated, that it is common to hear people mis- 
pronounce words that you did not suppose 
they had ever seen. In reading to them- 
selves they glide over these words, in read- 
ing aloud they stumble over them. Besides, 
our e very-day books and newspapers are so 
larded with French that the ordinary reader 
is obliged marcher d pas de loup, — for in- 
stance. 

The newspaper is probably responsible for 
making current many words with which the 
general reader is familiar, but which he rises 
to in the flow of conversation, and strikes at 
with a splash and an unsuccessful attempt at 
appropriation ; the word, which he perfectly 
knows, hooks him in the gills, and he cannot 
master it. The newspaper is thus widening 
the language in use, and vastly increasing 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 39 

the number of words which enter into com- 
mon talk. The Americans of the lowest in- 
tellectual class probably use more words to 
express their ideas than the similar class of 
any other people ; but this prodigality is 
partially balanced by the parsimony of words 
in some higher regions, in which a few 
phrases of current slang are made to do the 
whole duty of exchange of ideas ; if that can 
be called exchange of ideas when one intel- 
lect flashes forth to another the remark, con- 
cerning some report, that " you know how it 
is yourself," and is met by the response of 
"that's what's the matter," and rejoins with 
the perfectly conclusive " that 's so." It re- 
quires a high degree of culture to use slang 
with elegance and effect ; and we are yet 
very far from the Greek attainment. 



IV. 

The fireplace wants to be all aglow, the 
wind rising, the night heavy and black 
above, but light with sifting snow on the 
earth, — a background of inclemency for the 
illumined room with its pictured walls, tables 
heaped with books, capacious easy-chairs and 
their occupants, — it needs, I say, to glow 



40 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

and throw its rays far through the crystal of 
the broad windows, in order that we may 
rightly appreciate the relation of the wide- 
jambed chimney to domestic architecture in 
our climate. We fell to talking about it ; 
and, as is usual when the conversation is 
professedly on one subject, we wandered all 
around it. The young lady staying with us 
was roasting chestnuts in the ashes, and the 
frequent explosions required considerable at- 
tention. The mistress, too, sat somewhat 
alert, ready to rise at any instant and minis- 
ter to the fancied want of this or that guest, 
forgetting the reposeful truth that people 
about a fireside will not have any wants if 
they are not suggested. The worst of them, 
if they desire anything, only want something 
hot, and that later in the evening. And 
it is an open question whether you ought to 
associate with people who want that. 

I was saying that nothing had been so slow 
in its progress in the world as domestic ar- 
chitecture. Temples, palaces, bridges, aque- 
ducts, cathedrals, towers of marvellous deli- 
cacy and strength, grew to perfection while 
the common people lived in hovels, and the 
richest lodged in the most gloomy and con- 
tracted quarters. The dwelling-house is a 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 41 

modern institution. It is a curious fact that 
it has only improved with the social elevation 
of women. Men were never more brilliant 
in arms and letters than in the age of Eliz- 
abeth, and yet they had no homes. They 
made themselves thick-walled castles, with 
slits in the masonry for windows, for defence, 
and magnificent banquet-halls for pleasure ; 
the stone rooms into which they crawled for 
the night were often little better than dog- 
kennels. The Pompeians had no comfortable 
night-quarters. The most singular thing to 
me, however, is that, especially interested as 
woman is in the house, she has never done 
anything for architecture. And yet woman 
is reputed to be an ingenious creature. 

Herbert. I doubt if woman has real in- 
genuity; she has great adaptability. I don't 
say that she will do the same thing twice 
alike, like a Chinaman, but she is most cun- 
ning in suiting herself to circumstances. 

The Fire-Tender. Oh, if you speak of 
constructive, creative ingenuity, perhaps not ; 
but in the higher ranges of achievement — 
that of accomplishing any purpose dear to 
her heart, for instance — her ingenuity is 
simply incomprehensible to me. 

Herbert. Yes, if you mean doing things 
by indirection. 



42 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

The Mistress. When you men assume 
all the direction, what else is left to us ? 

The Fire-Tender. Did you ever see a 
woman refurnish a house ? 

The Young Lady Staying With Us. 
I never saw a man do it, unless he was burned 
out of his rookery. 

Herbert. There is no comfort in new 
things. 

The Fire-Tender (not noticing the in- 
terruption). Having set her mind on a total 
revolution of the house, she buys one new 
thing, not too obtrusive, nor much out of har- 
mony with the old. The husband scarcely 
notices it, least of all does he suspect the rev- 
olution, which she already has accomplished. 
Next, some article that does look a little 
shabby beside the new piece of furniture is 
sent to the garret, and its place is supplied 
by something that will match in color and 
effect. Even the man can see that it ought 
to match, and so the process goes on, it may 
be for years, it may be forever, until nothing 
of the old is left, and the house is trans- 
formed as it was predetermined in the wo- 
man's mind. I doubt if the man ever un- 
derstands how or when it was done ; his wife 
certainly never says anything about the re- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 43 

furnishing, but quietly goes on to new con- 
quests. 

The Mistress. And is n't it better to 
buy little by little, enjoying every new object 
as you get it, and assimilating each article to 
your household life, and making the home a 
harmonious expression of your own taste, 
rather than to order things in sets, and turn 
your house, for the time being, into a furni- 
ture wareroom? 

The Fire-Tender. Oh, I only spoke of 
the ingenuity of it. 

The Young Lady. For my part, I never 
can get acquainted with more than one piece 
of furniture at a time. 

Herbert. I suppose women are our su- 
periors in artistic taste, and I fancy that I 
can tell whether a house is furnished by a 
woman or a man ; of course, I mean the few 
houses that appear to be the result of indi- 
vidual taste and refinement, — most of them 
look as if they had been furnished on con- 
tract by the upholsterer. 

The Mistress. Woman's province in 
this world is putting things to rights. 

Herbert. With a vengeance, sometimes. 
In the study, for example. My chief objec- 
tion to woman is that she has no respect for 



44 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the newspaper, or the printed page, as such. 
She is Siva, the destroyer. I have noticed 
that a great part of a married man's time at 
home is spent in trying to find the things he 
has put on his study table. 

The Young Lady. Herbert speaks with 
the bitterness of a bachelor shut out of par- 
adise. It is my experience that if women 
did not destroy the rubbish that men bring 
into the house, it would become uninhab- 
itable, and need to be burned down every 
five years. 

The Fiee-Tendee. I confess women do 
a great deal for the appearance of things. 
When the mistress is absent, this room, al- 
though everything is here as it was before, 
does not look at all like the same place ; it 
is stiff, and seems to lack a soul. When 
she returns, I can see that her eye, even 
while greeting me, takes in the situation at 
a glance. While she is talking of the jour- 
ney, and before she has removed her trav- 
elling-hat, she turns this chair and moves 
that, sets one piece of furniture at a different 
angle, rapidly, and apparently unconsciously 
shifts a dozen little knick-knacks and bits 
of color, and the room is transformed. I 
could n't do it in a week. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 45 

The Mistkess. That is the first time I 
ever knew a man admit he could n't do any- 
thing if he had time. 

Herbert. Yet with all her peculiar in- 
stinct for making a home, women make 
themselves very little felt in our domestic 
architecture. 

The Mistress. Men build most of the 
houses in what might be called the ready- 
made-clothing style, and we have to do the 
best we can with them ; and hard enough it 
is to make cheerful homes in most of them. 
You will see something different when the 
woman is constantly consulted in the plan 
of the house. 

Herbert. We might see more difference 
if women would give any attention to ar- 
chitecture. Why are there no women ar- 
chitects ? 

The Fire-Tender. Want of the ballot, 
doubtless. It seems to me that here is a 
splendid opportunity for woman to come to 
the front. 

The Young Lady. They have no desire 
to come to the front ; they would rather 
manage things where they are. 

The Fire-Tender. If they would mas- 
ter the noble art, and put their brooding 



46 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

taste upon it, we might very likely compass 
something in our domestic architecture that 
we have not yet attained. The outside of 
our houses needs attention as well as the in- 
side. Most of them are as ugly as money 
can build. 

The Young Lady. What vexes me most 
is, that women — married women — have so 
easily consented to give up open fires in 
their houses. 

Herbert. They dislike the dust and the 
bother. I think that women rather like the 
confined furnace heat. 

The Fire-Tender. Nonsense ; it is their 
angelic virtue of submission. We wouldn't 
be hired to stay all day in the houses we 
build. 

The Young Lady. That has a very 
chivalrous sound, but I know there will be 
no reformation until women rebel and de- 
mand everywhere the open fire. 

Herbert. They are just now rebelling 
about something else ; it seems to me yours 
is a sort of counter-movement, a fire in the 
rear. 

The Mistress. 1 11 join that movement. 
The time has come when woman must strike 
for her altars and her fires. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 47 

Herbert. Hear, hear ! 

The Mistress. Thank you, Herbert. I 
applauded you once, when you declaimed 
that, years ago, in the old Academy. I 
remember how eloquently you did it. 

Herbert. Yes, I was once a spouting 
idiot. 

Just then the door-bell rang, and company 
came in. And the company brought in a 
new atmosphere, as company always does, — 
something of the disturbance of out-doors, 
and a good deal of its healthy cheer. The 
direct news that the thermometer was ap- 
proaching zero, with a hopeful prospect of 
going below it, increased to liveliness our 
satisfaction in the fire. When the cider was 
heated in the brown stone pitcher, there was 
difference of opinion whether there should 
be toast in it ; some were for toast, because 
that was the old-fashioned way, and others 
were against it, " because it does not taste 
good" in cider. Herbert said there was 
very little respect left for our forefathers. 

More wood was put on, and the flame 
danced in a hundred fantastic shapes. The 
snow had ceased to fall, and the moonlight 
lay in silvery patches among the trees in the 
ravine. The conversation became worldly. 



THIRD STUDY. 
I. 

Herbert said, as we sat by the fire one 
night, that he wished he had turned his at- 
tention to writing poetry like Tennyson's. 

The remark was not whimsical, but satiri- 
cal. Tennyson is a man of talent, who hap- 
pened to strike a lucky vein, which he has 
worked with cleverness. The adventurer 
with a pick-axe in Washoe may happen upon 
like good fortune. The world is full of po- 
etry as the earth is of " pay-dirt ; " one only 
needs to know how to " strike " it. An able 
man can make himself almost anything that 
he will. It is melancholy to think how many 
epic poets have been lost in the tea-trade, 
how many dramatists (though the age of the 
drama has passed) have wasted their genius 
in great mercantile and mechanical enter- 
prises. I know a man who might have been 
the poet, the essayist, perhaps the critic, of 
this country, who chose to become a county 
judge, to sit day after day upon a bench in 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 49 

an obscure corner of the world, listening to 
wrangling lawyers and prevaricating wit- 
nesses, preferring to judge his fellow-men 
rather than enlighten them. 

It is fortunate for the vanity of the living 
and the reputation of the dead that men get 
almost as much credit for what they do not 
as for what they do. It was the opinion of 
many that Burns might have excelled as a 
statesman, or have been a great captain in 
war ; and Mr. Carlyle says that if he had 
been sent to a university, and become a 
trained intellectual workman, it lay in him 
to have changed the whole course of British 
literature ! A large undertaking, as so vig- 
orous and dazzling a writer as Mr. Carlyle 
must know by this time, since British litera- 
ture has swept by him in a resistless and 
widening flood, mainly uncontaminated, and 
leaving his grotesque contrivances wrecked 
on the shore with other curiosities of letters, 
and yet among the richest of all the treas- 
ures lying there. 

It is a temptation to a temperate man to 
become a sot, to hear what talent, what ver- 
satility, what genius, is almost always at- 
tributed to a moderately bright man who is 
habitually drunk. Such a mechanic, such a 



50 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

mathematician, such a poet, he would be if 
he were only sober ; and then he is sure to 
be the most generous, magnanimous, friendly 
soul, conscientiously honorable, if he were 
not so conscientiously drunk. I suppose it 
is now notorious that the most brilliant and 
promising men have been lost to the world 
in this way. It is sometimes almost painful 
to think what a surplus of talent and genius 
there would be in the world if the habit of 
intoxication should suddenly cease ; and 
what a slim chance there would be for the 
plodding people who have always had toler- 
ably good habits. The fear is only mitigated 
by the observation that the reputation of a 
person for great talent sometimes ceases with 
his reformation. 

It is believed by some that the maidens 
who would make the best wives never marry, 
but remain free to bless the world with their 
impartial sweetness, and make it generally 
habitable. This is one of the mysteries of 
Providence and New England life. It seems 
a pity, at first sight, that all those who be- 
come poor wives have the matrimonial 
chance, and that they are deprived of the 
reputation of those who would be good 
wives were they not set apart for the high 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 51 

and perpetual office of priestesses of society. 
There is no beauty like that which was 
spoiled by an accident ; no accomplishments 
and graces are so to be envied as those that 
circumstances rudely hindered the develop- 
ment of. All of which shows what a char- 
itable and good-tempered world it is, not- 
withstanding its reputation for cynicism and 
detraction. 

Nothing is more beautiful than the belief 
of the faithful wife that her husband has all 
the talents, and could, if he would, be dis- 
tinguished in any walk in life ; and nothing 
will be more beautiful — unless this is a 
very dry time for signs — than the husband's 
belief that his wife is capable of taking 
charge of any of the affairs of this confused 
planet. There is no woman but thinks that 
her husband, the green-grocer, could write 
poetry if he had given his mind to it, or else 
she thinks small beer of poetry in compar- 
ison with an occupation or accomplishment 
purely vegetable. It is touching to see the 
look of pride with which the wife turns to 
her husband from any more brilliant per- 
sonal presence or display of wit than his, in 
the perfect confidence that if the world knew 
what she knows there would be one more 



52 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

popular idol. How she magnifies his small 
wit, and dotes upon the self-satisfied look in 
his face as if it were a sign of wisdom! 
What a councillor that man would make! 
What a warrior he would be ! There are a 
great many corporals in their retired homes 
who did more for the safety and success of 
our armies in critical moments, in the late 
war, than any of the " high-cock-a-lorum " 
commanders. Mrs. Corporal does not envy 
the reputation of General Sheridan ; she 
knows very well who really won Five Forks, 
for she has heard the story a hundred times, 
and will hear it a hundred times more with 
apparently unabated interest. What a gen- 
eral her husband would have made ; and how 
his talking talent would shine in Congress ! 

Herbert. Nonsense. There is n't a wife 
in the world who has not taken the exact 
measure of her husband, weighed him and 
settled him in her own mind, and knows him 
as well as if she had ordered him after de- 
signs and specifications of her own. That 
knowledge, however, she ordinarily keeps to 
herself, and she enters into a league with her 
husband, which he was never admitted to 
the secret of, to impose upon the world. In 
nine out of ten cases he more than half be- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 53 

lieves that he is what his wife tells him he 
is. At any rate, she manages him as easily 
as the keeper does the elephant, with only a 
bamboo wand and a sharp spike in the end. 
Usually she flatters him, but she has the 
means of pricking clear through his hide on 
occasion. It is the great secret of her power 
to have him think that she thoroughly be- 
lieves in him. 

The Young Lady Stating With Us. 
And you call this hypocrisy ? I have heard 
authors, who thought themselves sly obser- 
vers of women, call it so. 

Herbert. Nothing of the sort. It is the 
basis on which society rests, the conventional 
agreement. If society is about to be over- 
turned, it is on this point. Women are be- 
ginning to tell men what they really think of 
them ; and to insist that the same relations 
of downright sincerity and independence that 
exist between men shall exist between wo- 
men and men. Absolute truth between souls, 
without regard to sex, has always been the 
ideal life of the poets. 

The Mistress. Yes ; but there was never 
a poet yet who would bear to have his wife 
say exactly what she thought of his poetry, 
any more than he would keep his temper if 



54 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

his wife beat him at chess ; and there is 
nothing that disgusts a man like getting 
beaten at chess by a woman. 

Herbert. Well, women know how to win 
by losing. I think that the reason why most 
women do not want to take the ballot, and 
stand out in the open for a free trial of 
power, is that they are reluctant to change 
the certain domination of centuries, with 
weapons they are perfectly competent to 
handle, for an experiment. I think we should 
be better off if women were more transparent, 
and men were not so systematically puffed 
up by the subtle flattery which is used to 
control them. 

Mandeville. Deliver me from transpar- 
ency ! When a woman takes that guise, and 
begins to convince me that I can see through 
her like a ray of light, I must run or be 
lost. Transparent women are the truly dan- 
gerous. There was one on shipboard [Man- 
deville likes to say that ; he has just returned 
from a little tour in Europe, and he quite 
often begins his remarks with " on the ship 
going over ; " the Young Lady declares that 
he has a sort of roll in his chair, when he 
says it, that makes her seasick] who was 
the most innocent, artless, guileless, natural 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 55 

bunch of lace and feathers you ever saw ; 
she was all candor and helplessness and de- 
pendence ; she sang like a nightingale, and 
talked like a nun. There never was such 
simplicity. There was n't a sounding-line on 
board that would have gone to the bottom of 
her soulful eyes. But she managed the cap- 
tain and all the officers, and controlled the 
ship as if she had been the helm. All the 
passengers were waiting on her, fetching this 
and that for her comfort, inquiring of her 
health, talking about her genuineness, and 
exhibiting as much anxiety to get her ashore 
in safety as if she had been about to knight 
them all and give them a castle apiece when 
they came to land. 

The Mistkess. What harm ? It shows 
what I have always said, that the service o£ 
a noble woman is the most ennobling influ- 
ence for men. 

Mandeville. If she is noble, and not a 
mere manager. I watched this woman to see 
if she would ever do anything for any one 
else. She never did. 

The Fire-Tender. Did you ever see her 
again? I presume Mandeville has intro- 
duced her here for some purpose. 

Mandeville. No purpose. But we did 



56 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

see her on the Rhine ; she was the most dis- 
gusted traveller, and seemed to be in very ill 
humor with her maid. I judged that her 
happiness depended upon establishing con- 
trolling relations with all about her. On 
this Rhine boat, to be sure, there was reason 
for disgust. And that reminds me of a re- 
mark that was made. 

The Young Lady. Oh ! 

Mandeville. When we got aboard at 
Mayence we were conscious of a dreadful 
odor somewhere ; as it was a foggy morning, 
we could see no cause of it, but concluded it 
was from something on the wharf. The fog 
lifted, and we got under way, but the odor 
travelled with us, and increased. We went 
to every part of the vessel to avoid it, but in 
vain. It occasionally reached us in great 
waves of disagreeableness. We had heard 
of the odors of the towns on the Rhine, but 
we had no idea that the entire stream was 
infected. It was intolerable. 

The day was lovely, and the passengers 
stood about on deck holding their noses and 
admiring the scenery. You might see a row 
of them leaning over the side, gazing up at 
some old ruin or ivied crag, entranced with 
the romance of the situation, and all hold* 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 57 

ing their noses with thumb and finger. The 
sweet Rhine ! By and by somebody discov- 
ered that the odor came from a pile of cheese 
on the forward deck, covered with a canvas ; 
it seemed that the Rhinelanders are so fond 
of it that they take it with them when they 
travel. If there should ever be war between 
us and Germany, the borders of the Rhine 
would need no other defence from American 
soldiers than a barricade of this cheese. I 
went to the stern of the steamboat to tell a 
stout American traveller what was the origin 
of the odor he had been trying to dodge all 
the morning. He looked more disgusted than 
before when he heard that it was cheese ; 
but his only reply was : " It must be a 
merciful God who can forgive a smell like 
that ! " 

II. • 

The above is introduced here in order to 
illustrate the usual effect of an anecdote on 
conversation. Commonly it kills it. That 
talk must be very well in hand, and under 
great headway, that an anecdote thrown in 
front of will not pitch off the track and 
wreck. And it makes little difference what 
the anecdote is: a poor one depresses the 



58 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

spirits, and casts a gloom over the company; 
a good one begets others, and the talkers go 
to telling stories ; which is very good enter- 
tainment in moderation, but is not to be 
mistaken for that unwearying flow of argu- 
ment, quaint remark, humorous color, and 
sprightly interchange of sentiments and opin- 
ions, called conversation. 

The reader will perceive that all hope is 
gone here of deciding whether Herbert could 
have written Tennyson's poems, or whether 
Tennyson could have dug as much money 
out of the Heliogabalus Lode as Herbert 
did. The more one sees of life, I think the 
impression deepens that men, after all, play 
about the parts assigned them, according to 
their mental and moral gifts, which are lim- 
ited and preordained, and that their en- 
trances and exits are governed by a law no 
less certain because it is hidden. Perhaps 
nobody ever accomplishes all that he feels 
lies in him to do ; but nearly every one who 
tries his powers touches the walls of his be- 
ing occasionally, and learns about how far 
to attempt to spring. There are no impos- 
sibilities to youth and inexperience ; but 
when a person has tried several times to 
reach high C and been coughed down, he is 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 59 

quite content to go down among the chorus 
It is only the fools who keep straining at 
high C all their lives. 

Mandeville here began to say that that 
reminded him of something that happened 
when he was on the — 

But Herbert cut in with the observation 
that no matter what a man's single and sev- 
eral capacities and talents might be, he is 
controlled by his own mysterious individu- 
ality, which is what metaphysicians call the 
substance, all else being the mere accidents 
of the man. And this is the reason that we 
cannot with any certainty tell what any per- 
son will do or amount to, for, while we know 
his talents and abilities, we do not know the 
resulting whole, which is he himself. 

The Fire -Tender. So if you could take 
all the first-class qualities that we admire 
in men and women, and put them together 
into one being, you would n't be sure of the 
result ? 

Herbert. Certainly not. You would 
probably have a monster. It takes a cook 
of long experience, with the best materials, 
to make a dish " taste good ; " and the " taste 
good " is the indefinable essence, the result- 
ing balance or harmony which makes man 



60 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

or woman agreeable, or beautiful, or effec* 
tive in the world. 

The Young Lady. That must be the 
reason why novelists fail so lamentably in 
almost all cases in creating good characters. 
They put in real traits, talents, dispositions, 
but the result of the synthesis is something 
that never was seen on earth before. 

The Fire-Tender. Oh, a good character 
in fiction is an inspiration. We admit this 
in poetry. It is as true of such creations as 
Colonel Newcome, and Ethel, and Beatrix 
Esmond. There is no patchwork about 
them. 

The Young Lady. Why was n't Thack- 
eray ever inspired to create a noble wo- 
man? 

The Eire -Tender. That is the stand- 
ing conundrum with all the women. They 
will not accept Ethel Newcome even. Per- 
haps we shall have to admit that Thackeray 
was a writer for men. 

Herbert. Scott and the rest had drawn 
so many perfect women that Thackeray 
thought it was time for a real one. 

The Mistress. That 's ill-natured. Thack- 
eray did, however, make ladies. If he had 
depicted, with his searching pen, any of us 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 61 

just as we are, I doubt if we should have 
liked it much. 

Mandeville. That's just it. Thack- 
eray never pretended to make ideals, and if 
the best novel is an idealization of human 
nature, then he was not the best novelist. 
When I was crossing the Channel — 

The Misteess. Oh dear, if we are to go 
to sea again, Mandeville, I move we have in 
the nuts and apples, and talk about our 
friends. 

III. 

There is this advantage in getting back to 
a wood fire on the hearth, that you return to 
a kind of simplicity ; you can scarcely im- 
agine any one being stiffly conventional in 
front of it. It thaws out formality, and puts 
the company who sit around it into easy at- 
titudes of mind and body, — lounging atti- 
tudes, Herbert said. 

And this brought up the subject of culture 
in America, especially as to manner. The 
backlog period having passed, we are begin- 
ning to have in society people of the cultured 
manner, as it is called, or polished bearing, 
in which the polish is the most noticeable 
thing about the man. Not the courtliness, 



62 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the easy simplicity of the old-school gentle- 
man, in whose presence the milkmaid was as 
much at her ease as the countess, but some- 
thing far finer than this. These are the 
people of unruffled demeanor, who never for- 
get it for a moment, and never let you for- 
get it. Their presence is a constant rebuke 
to society. They are never "jolly;" their 
laugh is never anything more than a well- 
bred smile ; they are never betrayed into any 
enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a sign of inex- 
perience, of ignorance, of want of culture. 
They never lose themselves in any cause; 
they never heartily praise any man or wo- 
man or book ; they are superior to all tides 
of feeling and all outbursts of passion. They 
are not even shocked at vulgarity. They are 
simply indifferent. They are calm, visibly 
calm, painfully calm ; and it is not the eter- 
nal, majestic calmness of the Sphinx either, 
but a rigid, self-conscious repression. You 
would like to put a bent pin in their chair 
when they are about calmly to sit down. 

A sitting hen on her nest is calm, but 
hopeful ; she has faith that her eggs are not 
china. These people appear to be sitting on 
china eggs. Perfect culture has refined all 
blood, warmth, flavor, out of them. We ad* 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 63 

mire them without envy. They are too beau- 
tiful in their manners to be either prigs or 
snobs. They are at once our models and 
our despair. They are properly careful of 
themselves as models, for they know that if 
they should break, society would become a 
scene of mere animal confusion. 

Mandeville. I think that the best-bred 
people in the world are the English. 

The Young Lady. You mean at home. 

Mandeville. That 's where I saw them. 1 
There is no nonsense about a cultivated Eng- 
lish man or woman. They express them- 
selves sturdily and naturally, and with no sub- 
servience to the opinions of others. There 's 
a sort of hearty sincerity about them that I 
like. Ages of culture on the island have 
gone deeper than the surface, and they have 
simpler and more natural manners than we. 
There is something good in the full, round 
tones of their voices. 

Herbert. Did you ever get into a dil- 
igence with a growling Englishman who 
had n't secured the place he wanted ? 

The Mistress. Did you ever see an 
English exquisite at the San Carlo, and hear 
him cry " Bwavo " ? 

1 Mandeville once spent a week in London, riding about 
on the tops of omnibuses. 



64 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

Mandeville. At any rate, he acted out 
his nature, and was n't afraid to. 

The Eire-Tender. I think Mandeville 
is right, for once. The men of the best cul- 
ture in England, in the middle and higher 
social classes, are what you would call good 
fellows, — easy and simple in manner, en- 
thusiastic on occasion, and decidedly not cul- 
tivated into the smooth calmness of indiffer- 
ence which some Americans seem to regard 
as the sine qua non of good breeding. Their 
position is so assured that they do not need 
that lacquer of calmness of which we were 
speaking. 

The Young Lady. Which is different 
from the manner acquired by those who live 
a great deal in American hotels ? 

The Mistress. Or the Washington man- 
ner? 

Herbert. The last two are the same. 

The Eire-Tender. Not exactly. You 
think you can always tell if a man has 
learned his society carriage of a dancing- 
master. Well, you cannot always tell by a 
person's manner whether he is a habitue of 
hotels or of Washington. But these are dis. 
tinct from the perfect polish and politeness 
of indifferentism. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 65 

IV. 

Daylight disenchants. It draws one from 
the fireside, and dissipates the idle illusions 
of conversation, except under certain con- 
ditions. Let us say that the conditions are : 
a house in the country, with some forest- 
trees near, and a few evergreens, which are 
Christmas-trees all winter long, fringed with 
snow, glistening with ice-pendants, cheerful 
by day and grotesque by night ; a snow-storm 
beginning out of a dark sky, falling in a soft 
profusion that fills all the air, its dazzling 
whiteness making a light near at hand, which 
is quite lost in the distant darkling spaces. 

If one begins to watch the swirling flakes 
and crystals, he soon gets an impression of 
infinity of resources that he can have from 
nothing else so powerfully, except it be from 
Adirondack gnats. Nothing makes one feel 
at home like a great snow-storm. Our in- 
telligent cat will quit the fire and sit for 
hours in the low window, watching the fall- 
ing snow with a serious and contented air. 
His thoughts are his own, but he is in ac- 
cord with the subtlest agencies of Nature ; 
on such a day he is charged with enough 
electricity to run a telegraphic battery, if it 



66 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

could be utilized. The connection between 
thought and electricity has not been exactly 
determined, but the cat is mentally very 
alert in certain conditions of the atmosphere. 
Feasting his eyes on the beautiful out-doors 
does not prevent his attention to the slight- 
est noise in the wainscot. And the snow- 
storm brings content, but not stupidity, to 
all the rest of the household. 

I can see Mandeville now, rising from his 
arm-chair and swinging his long arms as he 
strides to the window, and looks out and up, 
with " Well, I declare ! " Herbert is pre- 
tending to read Herbert Spencer's tract on 
the philosophy of style ; but he loses much 
time in looking at the Young Lady, who is 
writing a letter, holding her portfolio in her 
lap, — one of her everlasting letters to one 
of her fifty everlasting friends. She is one 
of the female patriots who save the post-office 
department from being a disastrous loss to 
the treasury. Herbert is thinking of the 
great radical difference in the two sexes, 
which legislation will probably never change, 
that leads a woman always to write letters 
on her lap and a man on a table, — a dis- 
tinction which is commended to the notice 
of the anti-suffragists. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 67 

The Mistress, in a pretty little breakfast- 
cap, is moving about the room with a feather- 
duster, whisking invisible dust from the pic- 
ture-frames, and talking with the Parson, who 
has just come in, and is thawing the snow 
from his boots on the hearth. The Parson 
says the thermometer is 15°, and going 
down ; that there is a snow-drift across the 
main church entrance three feet high, and 
that the house looks as if it had gone into 
winter quarters, religion and all. There were 
only ten persons at the conference meeting 
last night, and seven of those were women ; 
he wonders how many weather-proof Chris- 
tians there are in the parish, anyhow. 

The Fire-Tender is in the adjoining li- 
brary, pretending to write ; but it is a poor 
day for ideas. He has written his wife's 
name about eleven hundred times, and can- 
not get any farther. He hears the Mistress 
tell the Parson that she believes he is trying 
to write a lecture on the Celtic Influence in 
Literature. The Parson says that it is a 
first-rate subject, if there were any such influ- 
ence, and asks why he does n't take a shovel 
and make a path to the gate. Mandeville 
says that, by George ! he himself should like 
no better fun, but it would n't look well for 



68 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

a visitor to do it. The Fire-Tender, not to 
be disturbed by this sort of chaff, keeps on 
writing his wife's name. 

Then the Parson and the Mistress fall 
to talking about the soup-relief, and about 
old Mrs. Grumples in Pig Alley, who had a 
present of one of Stowe's Illustrated Self- 
Acting Bibles on Christmas, when she had 
n't coal enough in the house to heat her 
gruel; and about a family behind the 
church, a widow and six little children and 
three dogs, and he did n't believe that any 
of them had known what it was to be warm 
in three weeks, and as to food, the woman 
said, she could hardly beg cold victuals 
enough to keep the dogs alive. 

The Mistress slipped out into the kitchen 
to fill a basket with provisions and send 
it somewhere ; and when the Fire-Tender 
brought in a new forestick, Mandeville, who 
always wants to talk, and had been sitting 
drumming his feet and drawing deep sighs, 
attacked him. 

Mandeville. Speaking about culture 
and manners, did you ever notice how ex- 
tremes meet, and that the savage bears him- 
self very much like the sort of cultured per- 
sons we were talking of last night? 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 69 

The Fire-Tender. In what respect ? 

Mandeville. Well, you take the North 
American Indian. He is never interested 
in anything, never surprised at anything. 
He has by nature that calmness and indiffer- 
ence which your people of culture have ac- 
quired. If he should go into literature as a 
critic, he would scalp and tomahawk with 
the same emotionless composure, and he 
would do nothing else. 

The Fire-Tender. Then you think the 
red man is a born gentleman of the highest 
breeding ? 

Mandeville. I think he is calm. 

The Fire-Tender. How is it about the 
war-path and all that ? 

Mandeville. Oh, these studiously calm 
and cultured people may have malice under- 
neath. It takes them to give the most effec- 
tive " little digs ; " they know how to stick 
in the pine-splinters and set fire to them. 

Herbert. But there is more in Mande- 
ville' s idea. You bring a red man into a 
picture-gallery, or a city full of fine archi- 
tecture, or into a drawing-room crowded with 
objects of art and beauty, and he is appar- 
ently insensible to them all. Now I have 
seen country people, — and by country peo- 



70 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

pie I don't mean people necessarily who live 
in the country, for everything is mixed in 
these days, — some of the best people in the 
world, intelligent, honest, sincere, who acted 
as the Indian would. 

The Mistress. Herbert, if I didn't 
know you were cynical, I should say you 
were snobbish. 

Herbert. Such people think it a point 
of breeding never to speak of anything in 
your house, nor to appear to notice it, how- 
ever beautiful it may be ; even to slyly 
glance around strains their notion of eti- 
quette. They are like the countryman who 
confessed afterwards that he could hardly 
keep from laughing at one of Yankee Hill's 
entertainments. 

The Young Lady. Do you remember 
those English people at our house in Flush- 
ing last summer, who pleased us all so much 
with their apparent delight in everything 
that was artistic or tasteful, who explored 
the rooms and looked at everything, and 
were so interested? I suppose that Her- 
bert's country relations, many of whom live 
in the city, would have thought it very ill- 
bred. 

Mandeville. It 's just as I said. The 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 71 

English, the best of them, have become so 
civilized that they express themselves, in 
speech and action, naturally, and are not 
afraid of their emotions. 

The Parson. I wish Mandeville would 
travel more, or that he had stayed at home. 
It 's wonderful what a fit of Atlantic sea- 
sickness will do for a man's judgment and 
cultivation. He is prepared to pronounce on 
art, manners, all kinds of culture. There is 
more nonsense talked about culture than 
about anything else. 

Herbert. The Parson reminds me of 
an American country minister I once met 
walking through the Vatican. You could n't 
impose upon him with any rubbish; he 
tested everything by the standards of his 
native place, and there was little that could 
bear the test. He had the sly air of a man 
who could not be deceived, and he went 
about with his mouth in a pucker of incre- 
dulity. There is nothing so placid as rustic 
conceit. There was something very enjoy- 
able about his calm superiority to all the 
treasures of art. 

Mandeville. And the Parson reminds 
me of another American minister, a consul 
in an Italian city, who said he was going up 



72 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

to Rome to have a thorough talk with the 
Pope, and give him a piece of his mind. 
Ministers seem to think that is their busi- 
ness. They serve it in such small pieces in 
order to make it go round. 

The Parson. Mandeville is an infidel. 
Come, let 's have some music ; nothing else 
will keep him in good humor till lunch-time. 

The Mistress. What shall it be ? 

The Parson. Give us the larghetto from 
Beethoven's second symphony. 

The Young Lady puts aside her portfolio. 
Herbert looks at the young lady. The Par- 
son composes himself for critical purposes. 
Mandeville settles himself in a chair and 
stretches his long legs nearly into the fire, 
remarking that music takes the tangles out 
of him. 

After the piece is finished, lunch is an- 
nounced. It is still snowing. 



FOURTH STUDY. 
I. 

It is difficult to explain the attraction 
which the uncanny and even the horrible 
have for most minds. I have seen a delicate 
woman half fascinated, bat wholly disgusted, 
by one of the most unseemly of reptiles, vul- 
garly known as the "blowing viper" of the 
Alleghanies. She would look at it, and turn 
away with irresistible shuddering and the 
utmost loathing, and yet turn to look at it 
again and again, only to experience the same 
spasm of disgust. In spite of her aversion 
she must have relished the sort of electric 
mental shock that the sight gave her. 

I can no more account for the fascination 
for us of the stories of ghosts and " appear- 
ances," and those weird tales in which the 
dead are the chief characters ; nor tell why 
we should fall into converse about them 
when the winter evenings are far spent, the 
embers are glazing over on the hearth, and 
the listener begins to hear the eerie noises in 



74 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the Louse. At such times one's dreams be- 
come of importance, and people like to tell 
them and dwell upon them, as if they were a 
link between the known and unknown, and 
could give us a clew to that ghostly region 
which in certain states of the mind we feel 
to be more real than that we see. 

Recently, when we were, so to say, sitting 
around the borders of the supernatural late 
at night, Mandeville related a dream of 
his which he assured us was true in every 
particular, and it interested us so much that 
we asked him to write it out. In doing so 
he has curtailed it, and to my mind shorn it 
of some of its more vivid and picturesque 
features. He might have worked it up with 
more art, and given it a finish which the 
narration now lacks, but I think best to in- 
sert it in its simplicity. It seems to me that 
it may properly be called — 

A NEW " VISION OF SIN." 

In the winter of 1850 I was a member of 
one of the leading colleges of this country. 
I was in moderate circumstances pecuniarily, 
though I was perhaps better furnished with 
less fleeting riches than many others. I was 
an incessant and indiscriminate reader of 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 75 

books. For the solid sciences I had no par- 
ticular fancy, but with mental modes and 
habits, and especially with the eccentric and 
fantastic in the intellectual and spiritual 
operations, I was tolerably familiar. All the 
literature of the supernatural was as real to 
me as the laboratory of the chemist, where I 
saw the continual struggle of material sub- 
stances to evolve themselves into more vol- 
atile, less palpable and coarse forms. My 
imagination, naturally vivid, stimulated by 
such repasts, nearly mastered me. At times 
I could scarcely tell where the material 
ceased and the immaterial began (if I may 
so express it) ; so that once and again I 
walked, as it seemed, from the solid earth 
onward upon an impalpable plain, where I 
heard the same voices, I think, that Joan of 
Arc heard call to her in the garden at Dom- 
remy. She was inspired, however, while I 
only lacked exercise. I do not mean this in 
any literal sense ; I only describe a state of 
mind. I was at this time of spare habit and 
nervous, excitable temperament. I was am- 
bitious, proud, and extremely sensitive. I 
cannot deny that I had seen something of 
the world, and had contracted about the av- 
erage bad habits of young men who have the 



76 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

sole care of themselves, and rather bungle 
the matter. It is necessary to this relation 
to admit that I had seen a trifle more of 
what is called life than a young man ought 
to see, but at this period I was not only sick 
of my experience, but my habits were as cor- 
rect as those of any Pharisee in our college, 
and we had some very favorable specimens 
of that ancient sect. 

Nor can I deny that at this period of my 
life I was in a peculiar mental condition. I 
well remember an illustration of it. I sat 
writing late one night, copying a prize es- 
say, — a merely manual task, leaving my 
thoughts free. It was in June, a sultry 
night, and about midnight a wind arose, 
pouring in through the open windows, full 
of mournful reminiscence, not of this, but of 
other summers, — the same wind that De 
Quincey heard at noonday in midsummer 
blowing through the room where he stood, a 
mere boy, by the side of his dead sister, — 
a wind centuries old. As I wrote on me- 
chanically I became conscious of a presence 
in the room, though I did not lift my eyes 
from the paper on which I wrote. Gradu- 
ally I came to know that my grandmother — • 
dead so long ago that I laughed at the idea 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 77 

— was in the room. She stood beside her 
old-fashioned spinning-wheel, and quite near 
me. She wore a plain muslin cap with a 
high puff in the crown, a short woollen gown, 
a white and blue checked apron, and shoes 
with heels. She did not regard me, but 
stood facing the wheel, with the left hand 
near the spindle, holding lightly between the 
thumb and forefinger the white roll of wool 
which was being spun and twisted on it. In 
her right hand she held a small stick. I 
heard the sharp click of this against the 
spokes of the wheel, then the hum of the 
wheel, the buzz of the spindles as the twist- 
ing yarn was teased by the whirl of its point, 
then a step backward, a pause, a step for- 
ward and the running of the yarn upon the 
spindle, and again a backward step, the 
drawing out of the roll, and the droning and 
hum of the wheel, — most mournful, hopeless 
sound that ever fell on mortal ear. Since 
childhood it has haunted me. All this time 
I wrote, and I could hear distinctly the 
scratching of the pen upon the paper. But 
she stood behind me (why I did not turn my 
head I never knew), pacing backward and 
forward by the spinning-wheel, just as I had 
a hundred times seen her in childhood in the 



78 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

old kitchen on drowsy summer afternoons. 
And I heard the step, the buzz and whirl of 
the spindle, and the monotonous and dreary 
hum of the mournful wheel. Whether her 
face was ashy pale and looked as if it might 
crumble at the touch, and the border of her 
white cap trembled in the June wind that 
blew, I cannot say, for I tell you I did not 
see her. But I hnow she was there, spin- 
ning yarn that had been knit into hose years 
and years ago by our fireside. For I was in 
full possession of my faculties, and never 
copied more neatly and legibly any manu- 
script than I did the one that night. And 
there the phantom (I use the word out of 
deference to a public prejudice on this sub- 
ject) most persistently remained until my 
task was finished, and, closing the portfolio, 
I abruptly rose. Did I see anything ? That 
is a silly and ignorant question. Could I 
see the wind which had now risen stronger, 
and drove a few cloud-scuds across the sky, 
filling the night, somehow, with a longing 
that was not altogether born of reminis- 
cence ? 

In the winter following, in January, I 
made an effort to give up the use of tobacco, 
■ — a habit in which I was confirmed, and of 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 79 

which I have nothing more to say than this : 
that I should attribute to it almost all the 
sin and misery in the world, did I not re- 
member that the old Romans attained a 
very considerable state of corruption with- 
out the assistance of the Virginia plant. 

On the night of the third day of my ab- 
stinence, rendered more nervous and excit- 
able than usual by the privation, I retired 
late, and later still I fell into an uneasy 
sleep, and thus into a dream, vivid, illumi- 
nated, more real than any event of my life. 
I was at home, and fell sick. The illness 
developed into a fever, and then a delirium 
set in ; not an intellectual blank, but a misty 
and most delicious wandering in places of in- 
comparable beauty. I learned subsequently 
that our regular physician was not certain to 
finish me, when a consultation was called, 
which did the business. I have the satisfac- 
tion of knowing that they were of the proper 
school. I lay sick for three days. 

On the morning of the fourth, at sunrise, 
I died. 

The sensation was not unpleasant. It was 
not a sudden shock. I passed out of my 
body as one would walk from the door of his 
house. There the body lay, — a blank, so 



80 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

far as I was concerned, and only interesting 
to me as I was rather entertained with 
watching the respect paid to it. My friends 
stood about the bedside, regarding me (as 
they seemed to suppose), while I, in a dif- 
ferent part of the room, could hardly repress 
a smile at their mistake, solemnized as they 
were, and I too, for that matter, by my re- 
cent demise. A sensation (the word you see 
is material and inappropriate) of ethereali- 
zation and imponderability pervaded me, 
and I was not sorry to get rid of such a dull, 
slow mass as I now perceived myself to be, 
lying there on the bed. When I speak of 
my death, let me be understood to say that 
there was no change, except that I passed 
out of my body and floated to the top of a 
bookcase in the corner of the room, from 
which I looked down. For a moment I was 
interested to see my person from the outside, 
but thereafter I was quite indifferent to the 
body. I was now simply soul. I seemed to 
be a globe, impalpable, transparent, about 
six inches in diameter. I saw and heard 
everything as before. Of course, matter was 
no obstacle to me, and I went easily and 
quickly wherever I willed to go. There was 
none of that tedious process of communicat- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 81 

ing my wishes to the nerves, and from them 
to the muscles. I simply resolved to be at 
a particular place, and I was there. It was 
better than the telegraph. 

It seemed to have been intimated to me 
at my death (birth I half incline to call it) 
that I could remain on this earth for four 
weeks after my decease, during which time 
I could amuse myself as I chose. 

I chose, in the first place, to see myself 
decently buried, to stay by myself to the 
last, and attend my own funeral for once. 
As most of those referred to in this true 
narrative are still living, I am forbidden to 
indulge in personalities, nor shall I dare to 
say exactly how my death affected my friends, 
even the home circle. Whatever others did, 
I sat up with myself and kept awake. I 
saw the " pennies " used instead of the 
" quarters " which I should have preferred. 
I saw myself " laid out," a phrase that has 
come to have such a slang meaning that I 
smile as I write it. When the body was put 
into the coffin I took my place on the lid. 

I cannot recall all the details, and they 
are commonplace besides. The funeral took 
place at the church. We all rode thither in 
carriages, and I, not fancying my place in 



82 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

mine, rode on the outside with the under- 
taker, whom I found to be a good deal more 
jolly than he looked to be. The coffin was 
placed in front of the pulpit when we arrived. 
I took my station on the pulpit cushion, from 
which elevation I had an admirable view of 
all the ceremonies, and could hear the ser- 
mon. How distinctly I remember the ser- 
vices ! I think I could even at this distance 
write out the sermon. The tune sung was 
of the usual country selection, — Mount 
Vernon. I recall the text. I was rather 
flattered by the tribute paid to me, and my 
future was spoken of gravely and as kindly 
as possible, — indeed, with remarkable char- 
ity, considering that the minister was not 
aware of my presence. I used to beat him 
at chess, and I thought, even then, of the 
last game ; for, however solemn the occasion 
might be to others, it was not so to me. 
With what interest I watched my kinsfolks 
and neighbors as they filed past for the last 
look! I saw, and I remember, who pulled 
a long face for the occasion and who exhib- 
ited genuine sadness. I learned with the 
most dreadful certainty what people really 
thought of me. It was a revelation never 
forgotten* 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 83 

Several particular acquaintances of mine 
were talking on the steps as we passed 
out. 

" Well, old Starr 's gone up. Sudden, 
was n't it ? He was a first-rate fellow." 

" Yes ; queer about some things, but he 
had some mighty good streaks," said an- 
other. And so they ran on. 

Streaks ! So that is the reputation one 
gets during twenty years of life in this 
world. Streaks ! 

After the funeral I rode home with the 
family. It was pleasanter than the ride 
down, though it seemed sad to my relations. 
They did not mention me, however, and I 
may remark that, although I stayed about 
home for a week, I never heard my name 
mentioned by any of the family. Arrived 
at home, the tea-kettle was put on, and sup- 
per got ready. This seemed to lift the gloom 
a little, and under the influence of the tea 
they brightened up, and gradually got more 
cheerful. They discussed the sermon and 
the singing, and the mistake of the sexton 
in digging the grave in the wrong place, 
and the large congregation. From the man- 
tel-piece I watched the group. They had 
waffles for supper, — of which I had been 



84 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

exceedingly fond, but now I saw them dis- 
appear without a sigh. 

For the first day or two of my sojourn at 
home I was here and there at all the neigh- 
bors', and heard a good deal about my life 
and character, some of which was not very 
pleasant, but very wholesome, doubtless, for 
me to hear. At the expiration of a week 
this amusement ceased to be such, for I 
ceased to be talked of. I realized the fact 
that I was dead and gone. 

By an act of volition I found myself back 
at college. I floated into my own room, 
which was empty. I went to the room of 
my two warmest friends, whose friendship I 
was, and am yet, assured of. As usual, half 
a dozen of our set were lounging there. 
A game of whist was just commencing. I 
perched on a bust of Dante on the top of 
the book -shelves, where I could see two of 
the hands and give a good guess at a third. 
My particular friend Timmins was just shuf- 
fling the cards. 

" Be hanged if it is n't lonesome without 
old Starr. Did you cut ? I should like to 
see him lounge in now with his pipe, and 
with feet on the mantel-piece proceed to ex- 
pound on the duplex functions of the soul." 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 85 

" There — misdeal ! " said his vis-d^vis. 
"Hope there 's been no misdeal for old 
Starr." 

" Spades, did you say ? " the talk ran on. 
" I never knew Starr was sickly." 

" No more was he ; stouter than you are, 
and as brave and plucky as he was strong. 
By George, fellows, how we do get cut down ! 
Last term little Stubbs, and now one of the 
best fellows in the class." 

" How suddenly he did pop off, — one for 
game, honors easy, — he was good for the 
Spouts' Medal this year, too." 

" Remember the joke he played on Prof. 
A., freshman year ? " asked another. 

"Remember he borrowed ten dollars of 
me about that time," said Timmins's part- 
ner, gathering the cards for a new deal. 

" Guess he is the only one who ever did," 
retorted some one. 

And so the talk went on, mingled with 
whist-talk, reminiscent of me, not all exactly 
what I would have chosen to go into my bi- 
ography, but on the whole kind and tender, 
after the fashion of the boys. At least I was 
in their thoughts, and I could see was a good 
deal regretted, — so I passed a very pleasant 
evening. Most of those present were of my 



86 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

society, and wore crape on their badges, and 
all wore the usual crape on the left arm. I 
learned that the following afternoon a eulogy 
would be delivered on me in the chapel. 

The eulogy was delivered before members 
of our society and others, the next afternoon, 
in the chapel. I need not say that I was 
present. Indeed, I was perched on the desk, 
within reach of the speaker's hand. The 
apotheosis was pronounced by my most in- 
timate friend, Timmins, and I must say he 
did me ample justice. He never was accus- 
tomed to " draw it very mild " (to use a vul- 
garism which 1 dislike) when he had his 
head, and on this occasion he entered into 
the matter with the zeal of a true friend, 
and a young man who never expected to 
have another occasion to sing a public " In 
Memoriam." It made my hair stand on end, 
— metaphorically, of course. From my 
childhood I had been extremely precocious. 
There were anecdotes of preternatural bright- 
ness, picked up, Heaven knows where, of my 
eagerness to learn, of my adventurous, chival- 
rous young soul, and of my arduous struggles 
with chill penury, which was not able (as it 
appeared) to repress my rage, until I entered 
this institution, of which I had been orna- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 87 

ment, pride, cynosure, and fair promising 
bud blasted while yet its fragrance was 
mingled with the dew of its youth. Once 
launched upon my college days, Timmins 
went on with all sails spread. I had, as it 
were, to hold on to the pulpit-cushion. Latin, 
Greek, the old literatures, I was perfect mas- 
ter of ; all history was merely a light repast 
to me ; mathematics I glanced at, and it dis- 
appeared; in the clouds of modern philos- 
ophy I was wrapped, but not obscured ; 
over the field of light literature I familiarly 
roamed as the honey-bee over the wide fields 
of clover which blossom white in the Junes 
of this world ! My life was pure, my char- 
acter spotless, my name was inscribed among 
the names of those deathless few who were 
not born to die ! 

It was a noble eulogy, and I felt before 
he finished, though I had misgivings at the 
beginning, that I deserved it all. The effect 
on the audience was a little different. They 
said it was a "strong" oration, and I think 
Timmins got more credit by it than I did. 
After the performance they stood about the 
chapel, talking in a subdued tone, and seemed 
to be a good deal impressed by what they 
had heard, or perhaps by thoughts of the de- 



88 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

parted. At least they all soon went over to 
Austin's and called for beer. My partic- 
ular friends called for it twice. Then they 
all lit pipes. The old grocery keeper was 
good enough to say that I was no fool if I did 
go off owing him four dollars. To the credit 
of human nature, let me here record that the 
fellows were touched by his remark reflect- 
ing upon my memory, and immediately made 
up a purse and paid the bill ; that is, they 
told the old man to charge it over to them. 
College boys are rich in credit and the pos- 
sibilities of life. 

It is needless to dwell upon the days I 
passed at college during this probation. So 
far as I could see, everything went on as if 
I were there, or had never been there. I 
could not even see the place where I had 
dropped out of the ranks. Occasionally I 
heard my name, but I must say that four 
weeks was quite long enough to stay in a 
world that had pretty much forgotten me. 
There is no great satisfaction in being 
dragged up to light now and then, like an 
old letter. The case was somewhat different 
with the people with whom I had boarded. 
They were relations of mine, and I often 
saw them weep, and they talked of me a 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 89 

good deal at twilight and Sunday nights, 
especially the youngest one, Carrie, who 
was handsomer than any one I knew, and 
not much older than I. I never used to 
imagine that she cared particularly for me, 
nor would she have done so if I had lived, 
but death brought with it a sort of senti- 
mental regret, which, with the help of a 
daguerreotype, she nursed into quite a little 
passion. I spent most of my time there, for 
it was more congenial than the college. 

But time hastened. The last sand of 
probation leaked out of the glass. One day, 
while Carrie played (for me, though she 
knew it not) one of Mendelssohn's " songs 
without words," I suddenly, yet gently, with- 
out self-effort or volition, moved from the 
house, floated in the air, rose higher, higher, 
by an easy, delicious, exultant, yet incon- 
ceivably rapid motion. The ecstasy of that 
triumphant flight! Groves, trees, houses, 
the landscape, dimmed, faded, fled away be- 
neath me. Upward mounting, as on angels' 
wings, with no effort, till the earth hung be- 
neath me a round black ball swinging, re- 
mote, in the universal ether. Upward mount- 
ing, till the earth, no longer bathed in the 
sun's rays, went out to my sight, — disap- 



90 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

peared in the blank. Constellations, before 
seen from afar, I sailed among. Stars, too 
remote for shining on earth, I neared, and 
found to be round globes flying through 
space with a velocity only equalled by my 
own. New worlds continually opened on 
my sight; new fields of everlasting space 
opened and closed behind me. 

For days and days — it seemed a mortal 
forever — I mounted up the great heavens, 
whose everlasting doors swung wide. How 
the worlds and systems, stars, constellations, 
neared me, blazed and flashed in splendor, 
and fled away ! At length, — was it not a 
thousand years ? — I saw before me, yet 
afar off, a wall, the rocky bourn of that 
country whence travellers come not back, a 
battlement wider than I could guess, the 
height of which I could not see, the depth 
of which was infinite. As I approached, it 
shone with a splendor never yet beheld on 
earth. Its solid substance was built of jew- 
els the rarest and stones of priceless value. 
It seemed like one solid stone, and yet all 
the colors of the rainbow were contained in 
it. The ruby, the diamond, the emerald, the 
carbuncle, the topaz, the amethyst, the sap- 
phire : of them the wall was built up in har. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 91 

monious combination. So brilliant was it 
that all the space I floated in was full of the 
splendor. So mild was it and so translucent 
that I could look for miles into its clear 
depths. 

Rapidly nearing this heavenly battlement, 
an immense niche was disclosed in its solid 
face. The floor was one large ruby. Its 
sloping sides were of pearl. Before I was 
aware I stood within the brilliant recess. I 
say I stood there, for I was there bodily, in 
my habit as I lived ; how, I cannot explain. 
Was it the resurrection of the body? Be- 
fore me rose, a thousand feet in height, a 
wonderful gate of flashing diamond. Beside 
it sat a venerable man, with long white 
beard, a robe of light gray, ancient sandals, 
and a golden key hanging by a cord from 
his waist. In the serene beauty of his noble 
features I saw justice and mercy had met 
and were reconciled. I cannot describe the 
majesty of his bearing or the benignity of 
his appearance. It is needless to say that I 
stood before St. Peter, who sits at the Ce- 
lestial Gate. 

I humbly approached, and begged admis- 
sion. St. Peter arose, and regarded me 
kindly, yet inquiringly. 



92 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

" What is your name," asked he, u and 
from what place do you come ? " 

I answered, and, wishing to give a name 
well known, said I was from Washington, 
United States. He looked doubtful, as if 
he had never heard the name before. 

" Give me," said he, " a full account of 
your whole life." 

I felt instantaneously that there was no 
concealment possible ; all disguise fell away, 
and an unknown power forced me to speak 
absolute and exact truth. I detailed the 
events of my life as well as I could, and the 
good man was not a little affected by the 
recital of my early trials, poverty, and temp- 
tation. It did not seem a very good life 
when spread out in that presence, and I 
trembled as I proceeded ; but I plead youth, 
inexperience, and bad examples. 

"Have you been accustomed," he said, 
after a time, rather sadly, " to break the 
Sabbath ? " 

I told him frankly that I had been rather 
lax in that matter, especially at college. I 
often went to sleep in the chapel on Sunday, 
when I was not reading some entertaining 
book. He then asked who the preacher was, 
and when I told him he remarked that 1 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 93 

was not so much to blame as he had sup- 
posed. 

" Have you," he went on, " ever stolen, or 
told any lie ? " 

I was able to say no, except admitting as 
to the first usual college " conveyances," and 
as to the last an occasional " blinder " to the 
professors. He was gracious enough to say 
that these could be overlooked as incident to 
the occasion. 

"Have you ever been dissipated, living 
riotously and keeping late hours ? ' ; 

" Yes." 

This also could be forgiven me as an in- 
cident of youth. 

" Did you ever," he went on, " commit the 
crime of using intoxicating drinks as a bev- 
erage ? " 

I answered that I had never been a habit- 
ual drinker, that I had never been what was 
called a " moderate drinker," that I had 
never gone to a bar and drank alone ; but 
that I had been accustomed, in company 
with other young men, on convivial occasions 
to taste the pleasures of the flowing bowl, 
sometimes to excess, but that I had also 
tasted the pains of it, and for months before 
my demise had refrained from liquor alto- 



94 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

gether. The holy man looked grave, but, 
after reflection, said this might also be over- 
looked in a young man. 

" What," continued he, in tones still more 
serious, " has been your conduct with regard 
to the other sex ? " 

I fell upon my knees in a tremor of fear. 
I pulled from my bosom a little book like 
the one Leperello exhibits in the opera of 
Don Giovanni. There, I said, was a record 
of my flirtation and inconstancy. I waited 
long for the decision, but it came in mercy. 

. " Rise," he cried ; " young men will be 
young men, I suppose. We shall forgive 
this also to your youth and penitence." 

" Your examination is satisfactory," he in- 
formed me, after a pause; "you can now 
enter the abodes of the happy." 

Joy leaped within me. We approached 
the gate. The key turned in the lock. The 
gate swung noiselessly on its hinges a little 
open. Out flashed upon me unknown splen- 
dors. What I saw in that momentary gleam 
I shall never whisper in mortal ears. I stood 
upon the threshold, just about to enter. 

" Stop ! one moment," exclaimed St. Peter, 
laying his hand on my shoulder ; " I have 
one more question to ask you." 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 95 

I turned toward him. 

" Young man, did you ever use tobacco f " 

" I both smoked and chewed in my life- 
time," I faltered, " but " — 

" Then to hell with you ! " he shouted 
in a voice of thunder. 

Instantly the gate closed without noise, 
and I was flung, hurled, from the battlement, 
down ! down ! down ! Faster and faster I 
sank in a dizzy, sickening whirl into an un- 
fathomable space of gloom. The light faded. 
Dampness and darkness were round about 
me. As before, for days and days I rose 
exultant in the light, so now forever I sank 
into thickening darkness, — and yet not 
darkness, but a pale, ashy light more fear- 
ful. 

In the dimness, I at length discovered a 
wall before me. It ran up and down and on 
either hand endlessly into the night. It was 
solid, black, terrible in its frowning massive- 
ness. 

Straightway I alighted at the gate, — a 
dismal crevice hewn into the dripping rock. 
The gate was wide open, and there sat — I 
knew him at once ; who does not ? — the 
Arch Enemy of mankind. He cocked his 
eye at me in an impudent, low, familiar 



96 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

manner that disgusted me. I saw that I was 
not to be treated like a gentleman. 

" Well, young man," said he, rising, with 
a queer grin on his face, " what are you sent 
here for?" 

" For using tobacco," I replied. 

" Ho ! " shouted he in a jolly manner, pe- 
culiar to devils, " that 's what most of 'em 
are sent here for now." 

Without more ado, he called four lesser 
imps, who ushered me within. What a 
dreadful plain lay before me ! There was a 
vast city laid out in regular streets, but there 
were no houses. Along the streets were 
places of torment and torture exceedingly 
ingenious and disagreeable. For miles and 
miles, it seemed, I followed my conductors 
through these horrors. Here was a deep vat 
of burning tar. Here were rows of fiery 
ovens. I noticed several immense caldron 
kettles of boiling oil, upon the rims of which 
little devils sat, with pitchforks in hand, and 
poked down the helpless victims who floun- 
dered in the liquid. But I forbear to go 
into unseemly details. The whole scene is as 
vivid in my mind as any earthly landscape. 

After an hour's walk my tormentors halted 
before the mouth of an oven, — a furnace 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 97 

heated seven times, and now roaring with 
flames. They grasped me, one hold of each 
hand and foot. Standing before the blazing 
mouth, they, with a swing, and a " one, two, 
three " — 

I again assure the reader that in this nar- 
rative I have set down nothing that was not 
actually dreamed, and much, very much of 
this wonderful vision I have been obliged to 
omit. 

Hcec fahula docet : It is dangerous for a 
young man to leave off the use of tobacco. 



FIFTH STUDY. 
I. 

I wish I could fitly celebrate the joyous- 
ness of the New England winter. Perhaps 
I could if I more thoroughly believed in it. 
But skepticism comes in with the south-wind. 
When that begins to blow, one feels the 
foundations of his belief breaking up. This 
is only another way of saying that it is more 
difficult, if it be not impossible, to freeze out 
orthodoxy, or any fixed notion, than it is to 
thaw it out ; though it is a mere fancy to 
suppose that this is the reason why the mar- 
tyrs, of all creeds, were burned at the stake. 
There is said to be a great relaxation in New 
England of the ancient strictness in the 
direction of toleration of opinion, called by 
some a lowering of the standard, and by 
others a raising of the banner of liberality ; 
it might be an interesting inquiry how much 
this change is due to another change, — the 
softening of the New England winter and 
the shifting of the Gulf Stream. It is the 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 99 

fashion nowadays to refer almost everything 
to physical causes, and this hint is a gratui- 
tous contribution to the science of metaphy- 
sical physics. 

The hindrance to entering fully into the 
joyousness of a New England winter, except 
far inland among the mountains, is the south- 
wind. It is a grateful wind, and has done 
more, I suspect, to demoralize society than 
any other. It is not necessary to remember 
that it rilled the silken sails of Cleopatra's" 
galley. -It blows over New England every 
few days, and is in some portions of it the 
prevailing wind. That it brings the soft 
clouds, and sometimes continues long enough 
to almost deceive the expectant buds of the 
fruit-trees, and to tempt the robin from the 
secluded evergreen copses, may be nothing ; 
but it takes the tone out of the mind, and 
engenders discontent, making one long for 
the tropics ; it feeds the weakened imagina- 
tion on palm-leaves and the lotus. Before 
we know it we become demoralized, and 
shrink from the tonic of the sudden change 
to sharp weather, as the steamed hydropathic 
patient does from the plunge. It is the in- 
sidious temptation that assails us when we 
are braced up to profit by the invigorating 
rigor of winter. 



100 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

Perhaps the influence of the four great 
winds on character is only a fancied one ; 
but it is evident on temperament, which is 
not altogether a matter of temperature, al- 
though the good old deacon used to say, in 
his humble, simple way, that his third wife 
was a very good woman, but her " tempera- 
ture was very different from that of the other 
two." The north-wind is full of courage, 
and puts the stamina of endurance into a 
man, and it probably would into a woman 
too if there were a series of resolutions passed 
to that effect. The west-wind is hopeful ; 
it has promise and adventure in it, and is, 
except to Atlantic voyagers America-bound, 
the best wind that ever blew. The east-wind 
is peevishness ; it is mental rheumatism and 
grumbling, and curls one up in the chimney- 
corner like a cat. And if the chimney ever 
smokes, it smokes when the wind sits in that 
quarter. The south-wind is full of longing 
and unrest, of effeminate suggestions of lux- 
urious ease, and perhaps we might say of 
modern poetry, — at any rate, modern poe- 
try needs a change of air. I am not sure 
but the south is the most powerful of the 
winds, because of its sweet persuasiveness. 
Nothing so stirs the blood in spring, when it 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 101 

comes up out of the tropical latitude ; it 
makes men " longen to gon on pilgrimages." 
I did intend to insert here a little poem 
(as it is quite proper to do in an essay) on 
the south- wind, composed by the Young 
Lady Staying With Us, beginning, — 

" Out of a drifting southern cloud 

My soul heard the night-bird cry," — 

but it never got any farther than this. The 
Young Lady said it was exceedingly difficult 
to write the next two lines, because not only 
rhyme, but meaning, had to be procured. 
And this is true ; anybody can write first 
lines, and that is probably the reason we 
have so many poems which seem to have 
been begun in just this way, that is, with a 
south-wind-longing without any thought in 
it, and it is very fortunate when there is not 
wind enough to finish them. This emotional 
poem, if I may so call it, was begun after 
Herbert went away. I liked it, and thought 
it was what is called " suggestive," although 
I did not understand it, especially what the 
night-bird was : and I am afraid I hurt the 
Young Lady's feelings by asking her if she 
meant Herbert by the " night-bird," — a 
very absurd suggestion about two unsenti- 
mental people. She said, " Nonsense ; " but 



102 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

she afterwards told the Mistress that there 
were emotions that one could never put into 
words without the danger of being ridiculous, 
— a profound truth. And yet I should not 
like to say that there is not a tender lone- 
someness in love that can get comfort out 
of a night-bird in a cloud, if there be such 
a thing. Analysis is the death of senti- 
ment. 

But to return to the winds. Certain peo- 
ple impress us as the winds do. Mandeville 
never comes in that I do not feel a north- 
wind vigor and healthfulness in his cordial, 
sincere, hearty manner, and in his wholesome 
way of looking at things. The Parson, you 
would say, was the east-wind, and only his 
intimates know that his peevishness is only 
a querulous humor. In the fair west-wind I 
know the Mistress herself, full of hope, and 
always the first one to discover a bit of blue 
in a cloudy sky. It would not be just to 
apply what I have said of the south-wind to 
any of our visitors, but it did blow a little 
while Herbert was here. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 103 



II. 



In point of pure enjoyment, with an intel- 
lectual sparkle in it, I suppose that no luxu- 
rious lounging on tropical isles set in tropical 
seas compares with the positive happiness 
one may have before a great wood fire (not 
two sticks laid crossways in a grate), with 
a veritable New England winter raging out- 
side. In order to get the highest enjoyment, 
the faculties must be alert, and not be lulled 
into a mere recipient dulness. There are 
those who prefer a warm bath to a brisk 
walk in the inspiring air, where ten thou- 
sand keen influences minister to the sense of 
beauty and run along the excited nerves. 
There are, for instance, a sharpness of hori- 
zon outline and a delicacy of color on dis- 
tant hills which are wanting in summer, and 
which convey to one rightly organized the 
keenest delight, and a refinement of enjoy- 
ment that is scarcely sensuous, not at all 
sentimental, and almost passing the intel- 
lectual line into the spiritual. 

I was speaking to Mandeville about this, 
and he said that I was drawing it altogether 
too fine ; that he experienced sensations of 
pleasure in being out in almost all weathers ; 



104 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

that lie rather liked to breast a north-wind, 
and that there was a certain inspiration in 
sharp outlines and in a landscape in trim 
winter-quarters, with stripped trees, and, as 
it were, scudding through the season under 
bare poles ; but that he must say that he 
preferred the weather in which he could sit 
on the fence by the wood-lot, with the spring 
sun on his back, and hear the stir of the 
leaves and the birds beginning their house- 
keeping. 

A very pretty idea for Mandeville ; and I 
fear he is getting to have private thoughts 
about the Young Lady. Mandeville natu- 
rally likes the robustness and sparkle of 
winter, and it has been a little suspicious to 
hear him express the hope that we shall have 
an early spring. 

I wonder how many people there are in 
New England who know the glory and in- 
spiration of a winter walk just before sunset, 
and that, too, not only on days of clear sky, 
when the west is aflame with a rosy color, 
which has no suggestion of languor or un- 
satisfied longing in it, but on dull days, when 
the sullen clouds hang about the horizon, full 
of threats of storm and the terrors of the 
gathering night. We are very busy with 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 105 

our own affairs, but there is always some- 
thing going on out-doors worth looking at ; 
and there is seldom an hour before sunset 
that has not some special attraction. And, 
besides, it puts one in the mood for the cheer 
and comfort of the open fire at home. 

Probably if the people of New England 
could have a plebiscitum on their weather, 
they would vote against it, especially against 
winter. Almost no one speaks well of win- 
ter. And this suggests the idea that most 
people here were either born in the wrong 
place, or do not know what is best for them. 
I doubt if these grumblers would be any bet- 
ter satisfied, or would turn out as well, in 
the tropics. Everybody knows our virtues, 

— at least if they believe half we tell them, 

— and for delicate beauty, that rare plant, 
I should look among the girls of the New 
England hills as confidently as anywhere, 
and I have travelled as far south as New 
Jersey, and west of the Genesee Valley. In- 
deed, it would be easy to show that the par- 
ents of the pretty girls in the West emi- 
grated from New England. And yet — such 
is the mystery of Providence — no one would 
expect that one of the sweetest and most 
delicate flowers that blooms, the trailing 



106 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

arbutus, would blossom in this inhospitable 
climate, and peep forth from the edge of a 
snow-bank at that. 

It seems unaccountable to a superficial ob- 
server that the thousands of people who are 
dissatisfied with their climate do not seek 
a more congenial one — or stop grumbling. 
The world is so small, and all parts of it are 
so accessible, it has so many varieties of cli- 
mate, that one could surely suit himself by 
searching ; and, then, is it worth while to 
waste our one short life in the midst of un- 
pleasant surroundings and in a constant fric- 
tion with that which is disagreeable? One 
would suppose that people set down on this 
little globe would seek places on it most 
agreeable to themselves. It must be that 
they are much more content with the climate 
and country upon which they happen, by the 
accident of their birth, than they pretend to 
be. 

III. 

Home sympathies and charities are most 
active in the winter. Coming in from my 
late walk, — in fact driven in by a hurrying 
north-wind that would brook no delay, a 
wind that brought snow that did not seem to 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 107 

fall out of a bounteous sky, but to be blown 
from polar fields, — I find the Mistress re- 
turned from town, all in a glow of philan- 
thropic excitement. 

There has been a meeting of a woman's 
association for Ameliorating the Condition 
of somebody — here at home. Any one can 
belong to it by paying a dollar, and for 
twenty dollars one can become a life Amel- 
iorator, — a sort of life assurance. The 
Mistress, at the meeting, I believe, "sec- 
onded the motion " several times, and is one 
of the Vice-Presidents; and this family 
honor makes me feel almost as if I were a 
president of something myself. These little 
distinctions are among the sweetest things in 
life, and to see one's name officially printed 
stimulates his charity, and is almost as satis- 
factory as being the chairman of a committee 
or the mover of a resolution. It is, I think, 
fortunate, and not at all discreditable, that 
our little vanity, which is reckoned among 
our weaknesses, is thus made to contribute 
to the activity of our nobler powers. What- 
ever we may say, we all of us like distinc- 
tion ; and probably there is no more subtle 
flattery than that conveyed in the whisper, 
" That 's he," " That 's she.'' 



108 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

There used to be a society for amelior- 
ating the condition of the Jews ; but they 
were found to be so much more adept than 
other people in ameliorating their own con- 
dition that I suppose it was given up. 
Mandeville says that to his knowledge there 
are a great many people who get up amel- 
iorating enterprises merely to be conspicu- 
ously busy in society, or to earn a little 
something in a good cause. They seem to 
think that the world owes them a living be- 
cause they are philanthropists. In this 
Mandeville does not speak with his usual 
charity. It is evident that there are Jews, 
and some Gentiles, whose condition needs 
ameliorating, and if very little is really ac- 
complished in the effort for them, it always 
remains true that the charitable reap a ben- 
efit to themselves. It is one of the beautiful 
compensations of this life that no one can 
sincerely try to help another without helping 
himself. 

Our Next-Door Neighbor. Why is it 
that almost all philanthropists and reform- 
ers are disagreeable ? 

I ought to explain who our next-door 
neighbor is. He is the person who comes 
in without knocking, drops in in the most 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 109 

natural way, as his wife does also, and not 
seldom in time to take the after-dinner cup 
of tea before the fire. Formal society begins 
as soon as you lock your doors, and only ad- 
mit visitors through the media of bells and 
servants. It is lucky for us that our next- 
door neighbor is honest. 

The Parson. Why do you class reform- 
ers and philanthropists together? Those 
usually called reformers are not philanthro- 
pists at all. They are agitators. Finding 
the world disagreeable to themselves, they 
wish to make it as unpleasant to others as 
possible. 

Mandeville. That's a noble view of 
your fellow-men. 

Oue Next Door. Well, granting the 
distinction, why are both apt to be unpleas- 
ant people to live with ? 

The Parson. As if the unpleasant peo- 
ple who won't mind their own business were 
confined to the classes you mention ! Some 
of the best people I know are philanthro- 
pists, — I mean the genuine ones, and not 
the uneasy busybodies seeking notoriety as 
a means of living. 

The Fire-Tender. It is not altogether 
the not minding their own business. Nobody 



110 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

does that. The usual explanation is that 
people with one idea are tedious. But that 
is not all of it. For few persons have more 
than one idea, — ministers, doctors, lawyers, 
teachers, manufacturers, merchants, — they 
all think the world they live in is the central 
one. 

Mandeville. And you might add au- 
thors. To them nearly all the life of the 
world is in letters, and I suppose they would 
be astonished if they knew how little the 
thoughts of the majority of people are occu- 
pied with books, and with all that vast 
thought-circulation which is the vital cur- 
rent of the world to book-men. Newspapers 
have reached their present power by becom- 
ing unliterary, and reflecting all the inter- 
ests of the world. 

The Mistress. I have noticed one thing, 
that the most popular persons in society are 
those who take the world as it is, find the 
least fault, and have no hobbies. They are 
always wanted to dinner. 

The Young Lady. And the other kind 
always appear to me to want a dinner. 

The Fire-Tekder. It seems to me that 
the real reason why reformers and some 
philanthropists are unpopular is that they 



BACKLOG STUDIES. Ill 

disturb our serenity and make us conscious 
of our own short-comings. It is only now 
and then that a whole people get a spasm of 
reformatory fervor, of investigation and re- 
generation. At other times they rather hate 
those who disturb their quiet. 

Our Next Dooe. Professional reform- 
ers and philanthropists are insufferably con- 
ceited and intolerant. 

The Mistress. Everything depends upon 
the spirit in which a reform or a scheme of 
philanthropy is conducted. 

Mandeville. I attended a protracted 
convention of reformers of a certain evil, 
once, and had the pleasure of taking dinner 
with a tableful of them. It was one of those 
country dinners accompanied with green tea. 
Every one disagreed with every one else, 
and you would n't wonder at it, if you had 
seen them. They were people with whom 
good food would n't agree. George Thomp- 
son was expected at the convention, and I 
remember that there was almost a cordiality 
in the talk about him, until one sallow 
brother casually mentioned that George took 
snuff, when a chorus of deprecatory groans 
went up from the table. One long-faced 
maiden in spectacles, with purple ribbons in 



112 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

her hair, who drank five cups of tea by my 
count, declared that she was perfectly dis- 
gusted, and did n't want to hear him speak. 
In the course of the meal the talk ran upon 
the discipline of children, and how to ad- 
minister punishment. I was quite taken by 
the remark of a thin, dyspeptic man who 
summed up the matter by growling out in 
a harsh, deep bass voice, "Punish 'em in 
love ! " It sounded as if he had said, " Shoot 
'em on the spot ! " 

The Pakson. I supposed you would 
say that he was a minister. There is an- 
other thing about those people. I think 
they are working against the course of na- 
ture. Nature is entirely indifferent to any 
reform. She perpetuates a fault as persist- 
ently as a virtue. There 's a split in my 
thumb-nail that has been scrupulously con- 
tinued for many years, notwithstanding all 
my efforts to make the nail resume its old 
regularity. You see the same thing in 
trees whose bark is cut, and in melons that 
have had only one summer's intimacy with 
squashes. The bad traits in character are 
passed down from generation to generation 
with as much care as the good ones. Nature, 
unaided, never reforms anything. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 113 

Mandeville. Is that the essence of 
Calvinism ? 

The Parson. Calvinism has n't any es- 
sence, — it 's a fact. 

Mandeville. When I was a boy, I 
always associated Calvinism and calomel 
together. I thought that homoeopathy — 
similia, etc. — had done away with both of 
them. 

Our Next Door (rising). If you are 
going into theology, I 'm off. 

IV. 

I fear we are not getting on much with 
the joyousness of winter. In order to be 
exhilarating it must be real winter. I have 
noticed that the lower the thermometer sinks 
the more fiercely the north-wind rages, and 
the deeper the snow is the higher rise the 
spirits of the community. The activity of 
the " elements " has a great effect upon 
country folk especially ; and it is a more 
wholesome excitement than that caused by a 
great conflagration. The abatement of a 
snow-storm that grows to exceptional mag- 
nitude is regretted, for there is always the 
half -hope that this will be, since it has gone 



114 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

so far, the largest fall of snow ever known 
in the region, burying out of sight the great 
fall of 1808, the account of which is cir- 
cumstantially and aggravatingly thrown in 
our way annually upon the least provocation. 
We all know how it reads : " Some said it 
began at daylight, others that it set in after 
sunrise ; but all agree that by eight o'clock 
Friday morning it was snowing in heavy 
masses that darkened the air." 

The morning after we settled the five — 
or is it seven ? — points of Calvinism, there 
began a very hopeful snow-storm, one of 
those wide-sweeping, careering storms that 
may not much affect the city, but which 
strongly impress the country imagination 
with a sense of the personal qualities of the 
weather, — power, persistency, fierceness, 
and roaring exultation. Out-doors was ter- 
rible to those who looked out of windows, 
and heard the raging wind, and saw the 
commotion in all the high tree-tops and the 
writhing of the low evergreens, and could 
not summon resolution to go forth and breast 
and conquer the bluster. The sky was dark 
with snow, which was not permitted to fall 
peacefully like a blessed mantle, as it some* 
times does, but was blown and rent and tossed 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 115 

like the split canvas of a ship in a gale. 
The world was taken possession of by the 
demons of the air, who had their will of it. 
There is a sort of fascination in snch a scene 
equal to that of a tempest at sea, and with- 
out its attendant haunting sense of peril ; 
there is no fear that the house will founder 
or dash against your neighbor's cottage, 
which is dimly seen anchored across the 
field ; at every thundering onset there is no 
fear that the cook's galley will upset, or the 
screw break loose and smash through the 
side, and we are not in momently expecta- 
tion of the tinkling of the little bell to " stop 
her." The snow rises in drifting waves, and 
the naked trees bend like strained masts ; 
but so long as the window-blinds remain 
fast, and the chimney-tops do not go, we 
preserve an equal mind. Nothing more 
serious can happen than the failure of the 
butcher's and the grocer's carts, unless, in- 
deed, the little news-carrier should fail to 
board us with the world's daily bulletin, or 
our next-door neighbor should be deterred 
from coming to sit by the blazing, excited 
fire, and interchange the trifling, harmless 
gossip of the day. The feeling of seclusion 
on such a day is sweet, but the true friend 



116 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

who does brave the storm and come is wel- 
comed with a sort of enthusiasm that his 
arrival in pleasant weather would never ex- 
cite. The snow-bound in their Arctic hulk 
are glad to see even a wandering Esquimau. 

On such a day I recall the great snow- 
storms on the northern New England hills, 
which lasted for a week with no cessation, 
with no sunrise or sunset, and no observa- 
tion at noon ; and the sky all the while dark 
with the driving snow, and the whole world 
full of the noise of the rioting Boreal forces ; 
until the roads were obliterated, the fences 
covered, and the snow was piled solidly above 
the first-story windows of the farm-house on 
one side, and drifted before the front door 
so high that egress could only be had by 
tunnelling the bank. 

After such a battle and siege, when the 
wind fell and the sun struggled out again, 
the pallid world lay subdued and tranquil, 
and the scattered dwellings were not unlike 
wrecks stranded by the tempest and half 
buried in sand. But when the blue sky 
again bent over all, the wide expanse of 
snow sparkled like diamond-fields, and the 
chimney signal-smokes could be seen, how 
beautiful was the picture ! Then began the 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 117 

stir abroad, and the efforts to open up com- 
munication through roads, or fields, or wher- 
ever paths could be broken, and the ways to 
the meeting-house first of alL Then from 
every house and hamlet the men turned out 
with shovels, with the patient, lumbering 
oxen yoked to the sleds, to break the roads, 
driving into the deepest drifts, shovelling 
and shouting as if the severe labor were a 
holiday frolic, the courage and hilarity rising 
with the difficulties encountered ; and relief 
parties, meeting at length in the midst of the 
wide white desolation, hailed each other as 
chance explorers in new lands, and made the 
whole country - side ring with the noise of 
their congratulations. There was as much 
excitement and healthy stirring of the blood 
in it as in the Fourth of July, and perhaps 
as much patriotism. The boy saw it in 
dumb show from the distant, low farm-house 
window, and wished he were a man. At 
night there were great stories of achievement 
told by the cavernous fireplace ; great lati- 
tude was permitted in the estimation of the 
size of particular drifts, but never any agree- 
ment was reached as to the " depth on a 
level." I have observed since that people 
are quite as apt to agree upon the marvel" 



118 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

lous and the exceptional as upon simple 
facts. 

V. 

By the firelight and the twilight^, the 
Young Lady is finishing a letter to Herbert, 
— writing it, literally, on her knees, trans- 
forming thus the simple deed into an act of 
devotion. Mandeville says that it is bad for 
her eyes, but the sight of it is worse for his 
eyes. He begins to doubt the wisdom of 
reliance upon that worn apothegm about 
absence conquering love. Memory has the 
singular characteristic of recalling in a friend 
absent, as in a journey long past, only that 
which is agreeable. Mandeville begins to 
wish he were in New South Wales. 

I did intend to insert here a letter of Her- 
bert's to the Young Lady, — obtained, I need 
not say, honorably, as private letters which 
get into print always are, — not to gratify a 
vulgar curiosity, but to show how the most 
unsentimental and cynical people are affected 
by the master passion. But I cannot bring 
myself to do it. Even in the interests of sci- 
ence one has no right to make an autopsy of 
two loving hearts, especially when they are 
suffering under a late attack of the one agree- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 119 

able epidemic. All the world loves a lover, 
but it laughs at him none the less in his ex- 
travagances. He loses his accustomed reti- 
cence ; he has something of the martyr's wil- 
lingness for publicity ; he would even like to 
show the sincerity of his devotion by some 
piece of open heroism. Why should he con- 
ceal a discovery which has transformed the 
world to him, a secret which explains all the 
mysteries of nature and humanity? He is 
in that ecstasy of mind which prompts those 
who were never orators before to rise in an 
experience-meeting and pour out a flood of 
feeling in the tritest language and the most 
conventional terms. I am not sure that Her- 
bert, while in this glow, would be ashamed 
of his letter in print, but this is one of the 
cases where chancery would step in and pro- 
tect one from himself by his next friend. 
This is really a delicate matter, and perhaps 
it is brutal to allude to it at all. 

In truth, the letter would hardly be in- 
teresting in print. Love has a marvellous 
power of vivifying language and charging 
the simplest words with the most tender 
meaning, of restoring to them the power 
they had when first coined. They are words 
of fire to those two who know their secret, 



120 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

but not to others. It is generally admitted 
that the best love-letters would not make 
very good literature. "Dearest," begins 
Herbert, in a burst of originality, felicitously 
selecting a word whose exclusiveness shuts 
out all the world but one, and which is a 
whole letter, poem, confession, and creed, in 
one breath. What a weight of meaning it 
has to carry ! There may be beauty and 
wit and grace and naturalness and even the 
splendor of fortune elsewhere, but there is 
one woman in the world whose sweet pres- 
ence would be compensation for the loss of 
all else. It is not to be reasoned about ; he 
wants that one ; it is her plume dancing 
down the sunny street that sets his heart 
beating ; he knows her form among a thou- 
sand, and follows her ; he longs to run after 
her carriage, which the cruel coachman whirls 
out of his sight. It is marvellous to him that 
all the world does not want her too, and he 
is in a panic when he thinks of it. And what 
exquisite flattery is in that little word ad- 
dressed to her, and with what sweet and 
meek triumph she repeats it to herself, with 
a feeling that is not altogether pity for those 
who still stand and wait. To be chosen out 
of all the available world, — it is almost as 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 121 

much bliss as it is to choose. "All that 
long, long stage-ride from Blim's to Portage 
I thought of you every moment, and won- 
dered what you were doing and how you 
were looking just that moment, and I found 
the occupation so charming that I was almost 
sorry when the journey was ended." Not 
much in that ! But I have no doubt the 
Young Lady read it over and over, and 
dwelt also upon every moment, and found in 
it new proof of unshaken constancy, and had 
in that and the like things in the letter a 
sense of the sweetest communion. There is 
nothing in this letter that we need dwell on 
it, but I am convinced that the mail does not 
carry any other letters so valuable as this 
sort. 

I suppose that the appearance of Herbert 
in this new light unconsciously gave tone a 
little to the evening's talk ; not that any- 
body mentioned him, but Mandeville was 
evidently generalizing from the qualities that 
make one person admired by another to 
those that win the love of mankind. 

Mandeville. There seems to be some- 
thing in some persons that wins them liking, 
special or general, independent almost of 
what they do or say. 



122 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

The Mistress. Why, everybody is liked 
by some one. 

Mandeville. I'm not sure of that. 
There are those who are friendless, and 
would be if they had endless acquaintances. 
But, to take the case away from ordinary 
examples, in which habit and a thousand 
circumstances influence liking, what is it 
that determines the world upon a perso- 
nal regard for authors whom it has never 
seen ? 

The Fire-Tender. Probably it is the 
spirit shown in their writings. 

The Mistress. More likely it is a sort 
of tradition ; I don't believe that the world 
has a feeling of personal regard for any 
author who was not loved by those who 
knew him most intimately. 

The Fire-Tender. Which comes to the 
same thing. The qualities, the spirit, that 
got him the love of his acquaintances he put 
into his books. 

Mandeville. That does n't seem to me 
sufficient. Shakespeare has put everything 
into his plays and poems, swept the whole 
range of human sympathies and passions, 
and at times is inspired by the sweetest spirit 
that ever man had. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 123 

The Young Lady. No one has better 
interpreted love. 

Mandeville. Yet I apprehend that no 
person living has any personal regard for 
Shakespeare, or that his personality affects 
many, — except they stand in Stratford 
chnrch and feel a sort of awe at the thought 
that the bones of the greatest poet are so 
near them. 

The Parson. I don't think the world 
cares personally for any mere man or woman 
dead for centuries. 

Mandeville. But there is a difference. 
I think there is still rather a warm feeling 
for Socrates the man, independent of what 
he said, which is little known. Homer's 
works are certainly better known, but no 
one cares personally for Homer any more 
than for any other shade. 

Our Next Door. Why not go back to 
Moses ? We 've got the evening before us 
for digging up people. 

Mandeville. Moses is a very good il- 
lustration. No name of antiquity is better 
known, and yet I fancy he does not awaken 
the same kind of popular liking that Soc- 
rates does. 

Our Next Door. Fudge ! You just get 



124 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

up in any lecture assembly and propose 
three cheers for Socrates, and see where 
you'll be. Mandeville ought to be a mis- 
sionary, and read Robert Browning to the 
Fijis. 

The Fire-Tender. How do you ac- 
count for the alleged personal regard for 
Socrates? 

The Parson. Because the world called 
Christian is still more than half heathen. 

Mandeyille. He was a plain man ; his 
sympathies were with the people ; he had 
what is roughly known as " horse-sense," 
and he was homely. Franklin and Abraham 
Lincoln belong to his class. They were all 
philosophers of the shrewd sort, and they all 
had humor. It was fortunate for Lincoln 
that, with his other qualities, he was homely. 
That was the last touching recommendation 
to the popular heart. 

The Mistress. Do you remember that 
ugly brown-stone statue of St. Antonio by 
the bridge in Sorrento? He must have 
been a coarse saint, patron of pigs as he 
was, but I don't know any one anywhere, or 
the homely stone image of one, so loved by 
the people. 

Our Next Door. Ugliness being trump, 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 125 

I wonder more people don't win. Mande- 
ville, why don't you get up a " centenary " 
of Socrates, and put up his statue in the 
Central Park ? It would make that one of 
Lincoln in Union Square look beautiful. 

The Paeson. Oh, you '11 see that some 
day, when they have a museum there illus- 
trating the " Science of Religion." 

The Fiee-Tendee. Doubtless, to go back 
to what we were talking of, the world has a 
fondness for some authors, and thinks of 
them with an affectionate and half-pitying 
familiarity ; and it may be that this grows 
out of something in their lives quite as much 
as anything in their writings. There seems 
to be more disposition of personal liking to 
Thackeray than to Dickens, now both are 
dead, — a result that would hardly have 
been predicted when the world was crying 
over Little Nell, or agreeing to hate Becky 
Sharp. 

The Young Lady. What was that you 
were telling about Charles Lamb, the other 
day, Mandeville ? Is not the popular liking 
for him somewhat independent of his writ- 
ings? 

Mandeville. He is a striking example 
of an author who is loved. Very likely the 



126 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

remembrance of his tribulations has still 
something to do with the tenderness felt for 
him. He supported no dignity, and per- 
mitted a familiarity which indicated no self- 
appreciation of his real rank in the world of 
letters. I have heard that his acquaintances 
familiarly called him " Charley." 

Our Next Door. It 's a relief to know 
that ! Do you happen to know what Socrates 
was called ? 

Mandeville. I have seen people who 
knew Lamb very well. One of them told 
me, as illustrating his want of dignity, that 
as he was going home late one night through 
the nearly empty streets, he was met by a 
roistering party who were making a night 
of it from tavern to tavern. They fell upon 
Lamb, attracted by his odd figure and hesi- 
tating manner, and, hoisting him on their 
shoulders, carried him off, singing as they 
went. Lamb enjoyed the lark, and did not 
tell them who he was. When they were 
tired of lugging him, they lifted him, with 
much effort and difficulty, to the top of a 
high wall, and left him there amid the 
broken bottles, utterly unable to get down. 
Lamb remained there philosophically in the 
enjoyment of his novel adventure, until a 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 127 

passing watchman rescued him from his 
ridiculous situation. 

The Fire-Tender. How did the story 
get out ? 

Mandeville. Oh, Lamb told all about 
it next morning ; and when asked afterwards 
why he did so, he replied that there was no 
fun in it unless he told it. 



SIXTH STUDY. 
I. 

The King sat in the winter-house in the 
ninth month, and there was a fire on the 
hearth burning before him. . . . When Je- 
hudi had read three or four leaves he cut it 
with the penknife. 

That seems to be a pleasant and home-like 
picture from a not very remote period, — 
less than twenty-five hundred years ago, and 
many centuries after the fall of Troy. And 
that was not so very long ago, for Thebes, in 
the splendid streets of which Homer wan- 
dered and sang to the kings when Memphis, 
whose ruins are older than history, was its 
younger rival, was twelve centuries old when 
Paris ran away with Helen. 

I am sorry that the original — and you 
can usually do anything with the " original " 
— does not bear me out in saying that it 
was a pleasant picture. I should like to be- 
lieve that Jehoiakim — for that was the sin- 
gular name of the gentleman who sat by his 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 129 

hearthstone — had just received the Memphis 
" Palimpsest," fifteen days in advance of the 
date of its publication, and that his secretary- 
was reading to him that monthly, and cutting 
its leaves as he read. I should like to have 
seen it in that year when Thales was learn- 
ing astronomy in Memphis, and Necho was 
organizing his campaign against Carchemish. 
If Jehoiakim took the " Attic Quarterly," he 
might have read its comments on the "banish- 
ment of the Alcmseonidse, and its gibes at 
Solon for his prohibitory laws, forbidding 
the sale of unguents, limiting the luxury of 
dress, and interfering with the sacred rights 
of mourners to passionately bewail the dead 
in the Asiatic manner; the same number 
being enriched with contributions from two 
rising poets, — a lyric of love by Sappho, 
and an ode sent by Anacreon from Teos, 
with an editorial note explaining that the 
Maga was not responsible for the sentiments 
of the poem. 

But, in fact, the gentleman who sat before 
the backlog in his winter-house had other 
things to think of. For Nebuchadnezzar was 
coming that way with the chariots and horses 
of Babylon and a great crowd of marauders ; 
and the king had not even the poor choice 
/ 



130 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

whether he would be the vassal of the Chal- 
dean or of the Egyptian. To us, this is only 
a ghostly show of monarchs and conquerors 
stalking across vast historic spaces. It was 
no doubt a vulgar enough scene of "war and 
plunder. The great captains of that age 
went about to harry each other's territories 
and spoil each other's cities very much as we 
do nowadays, and for similar reasons ; Napo- 
leon the Great in Moscow, Napoleon the 
Small in Italy, Kaiser William in Paris, 
Great Scott in Mexico! Men have not 
changed much. 

— The Fire-Tender sat in his winter-gar- 
den in the third month ; there was a fire on 
the hearth burning before him. He cut the 
leaves of " Scribner's Monthly " with his 
penknife, and thought of Jehoiakim. 

That seems as real as the other. In the 
garden, which is a room of the house, the 
tall callas, rooted in the ground, stand about 
the fountain ; the sun, streaming through the 
glass, illumines the many-hued flowers. I 
wonder what Jehoiakim did with the mealy- 
bug on his passion-vine, and if he had any 
way of removing the scale -bug from his 
African acacia? One would like to know, 
too, how he treated the red-spider on the Le 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 131 

Marque rose. The record is silent. I do 
not doubt lie had all these insects in his win- 
ter-garden, and the aphidae besides ; and he 
could not smoke them out with tobacco, for 
the world had not yet fallen into its second 
stage of the knowledge of good and evil by 
eating the forbidden tobacco-plant. 

I confess that this little picture of a fire 
on the hearth so many centuries ago helps 
to make real and interesting to me that 
somewhat misty past. No doubt the lotus 
and the acanthus from the Nile grew in that 
winter -house, and perhaps Jehoiakim at- 
tempted — the most difficult thing in the 
world — the cultivation of the wild-flowers 
from Lebanon. Perhaps Jehoiakim was in- 
terested also, as I am through this ancient 
fireplace, — which is a sort of domestic win- 
dow into the ancient world, — in the loves 
of Bernice and Abaces at the court of 
the Pharaohs. I see that it is the same 
thing as the sentiment — perhaps it is the 
shrinking which every soul that is a soul 
has, sooner or later, from isolation — which 
grew up between Herbert and the Young 
Lady Staying With Us. Jeremiah used to 
come in to that fireside very much as the 
Parson does to ours. The Parson, to be 



132 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

sure, never prophesies, but he grumbles, and 
is the chorus in the play that sings the ever- 
lasting ai ai of "I told you so ! " Yet we 
like the Parson. He is the sprig of bitter 
herb that makes the pottage wholesome. I 
should rather, ten times over, dispense with 
the flatterers and the smooth-sayers than the 
grumblers. But the grumblers are of two 
sorts, the healthful-toned and the winners. 
There are makers of beer who substitute for 
the clean bitter of the hops some deleterious 
drug, and then seek to hide the fraud by 
some cloying sweet. There is nothing of 
this sickish drug in the Parson's talk, nor 
was there in that of Jeremiah. I sometimes 
think there is scarcely enough of this whole- 
some tonic in modern society. The Parson 
says he never would give a child sugar-coated 
pills. Mandeville says he never would give 
them any. After all, you cannot help liking 
Mandeville. 

II. 

We were talking of this late news from 
Jerusalem. The Fire-Tender was saying that 
it is astonishing how much is telegraphed us 
from the East that is not half so interesting. 
He was at a loss philosophically to account 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 133 

for the fact that the world is so eager to 
know the news of yesterday which is unim- 
portant, and so indifferent to that of the day 
before which is of some moment. 

Mandeville. I suspect that it arises 
from the want of imagination. People need 
to touch the facts, and nearness in time is 
contiguity. It would excite no interest to 
bulletin the last siege of Jerusalem in a vil- 
lage where the event was unknown, if the 
date was appended ; and yet the account of 
it is incomparably more exciting than that 
of the siege of Metz. 

Oub Next Dook. The daily news is a 
necessity. I cannot get along without my 
morning paper. The other morning I took 
it up, and was absorbed in the telegraphic 
columns for an hour nearly. I thoroughly 
enjoyed the feeling of immediate contact 
with all the world of yesterday, until I read 
among the minor items that Patrick Dona- 
hue, of the city of New York, died of a sun- 
stroke. If he had frozen to death, I should 
have enjoyed that ; but to die of sunstroke 
in February seemed inappropriate, and I 
turned to the date of the paper. When I 
found it was printed in July, I need not say 
that I lost all interest in it, though why the 



134 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

trivialities and crimes and accidents, relating 
to people I never knew, were not as good 
six months after date as twelve hours, I can- 
not say. 

The Pike-Tender. You know that in 
Concord the latest news, except a remark or 
two by Thoreau or Emerson, is the Vedas. 
I believe the Rig- Veda is read at the break- 
fast-table instead of the Boston journals. 

The Parson. I know it is read after- 
ward instead of the Bible. 

Mandeville. That is only because it is 
supposed to be older. I have understood 
that the Bible is very well spoken of there, 
but it is not antiquated enough to be an 
authority. 

Our Next Door. There was a project 
on foot to put it into the circulating library, 
but the title New in the second part was 
considered objectionable. 

Herbert. Well, I have a good deal of 
sympathy with Concord as to the news. 
We are fed on a daily diet of trivial events 
and gossip, of the unfruitful sayings of 
thoughtless men and women, until our men- 
tal digestion is seriously impaired ; the day 
will come when no one will be able to sit 
down to a thoughtful, well-wrought book 
and assimilate its contents. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 135 

The Mistress. I doubt if a daily news- 
paper is a necessity, in the higher sense of 
the word. 

The Parson. Nobody supposes it is to 
women, — that is, if they can see each other. 

The Mistress. Don't interrupt, unless 
you have something to say ; though I should 
like to know how much gossip there is afloat 
that the minister does not know. The news- 
paper may be needed in society, but how 
quickly it drops out of mind when one goes 
beyond the bounds of what is called civiliza- 
tion. You remember when we were in the 
depths of the woods, last summer, how diffi- 
cult it was to get up any interest in the files 
of late papers that reached us, and how un- 
real all the struggle and turmoil of the world 
seemed. We stood apart) and could esti- 
mate things at their true value. 

The Young Lady. Yes, that was real 
life. I never tired of the guide's stories; 
there was some interest in the intelligence 
that a deer had been down to eat the lily- 
pads at the foot of the lake the night before ; 
that a bear's track was seen on the trail we 
crossed that day ; even Mandeville's fish- 
stories had a certain air of probability ; and 
how to roast a trout in the ashes and serve 



136 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

him hot and juicy and clean, and how to 
cook soup and prepare coffee and heat dish- 
water in one tin-pail, were vital problems. 

The Pakson. You would have had no 
such problems at home. Why will people 
go so far to put themselves to such inconve- 
nience ? I hate the woods. Isolation breeds 
conceit ; there are no people so conceited as 
those who dwell in remote wildernesses and 
live mostly alone. 

The Young Lady. For my part, I feel 
humble in the presence of mountains, and in 
the vast stretches of the wilderness. 

The Parson. I'll be bound a woman 
would feel just as nobody would expect her 
to feel, under given circumstances. 

Mandeville. I think the reason why 
the newspaper and the world it carries take 
no hold of us in the wilderness is that we 
become a kind of vegetable ourselves when 
we go there. I have often attempted to im- 
prove my mind in the woods with good solid 
books. You might as well offer a bunch of 
celery to an oyster. The mind goes to sleep : 
the senses and the instincts wake up. The 
best I can do when it rains, or the trout 
won't bite, is to read Dumas's novels. Their 
ingenuity will almost keep a man awake 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 137 

after supper, by the camp-fire. And there 
is a kind of unity about them that I like ; 
the history is as good as the morality. 

Our Next Door. I always wondered 
where Mandeville got his historical facts. 

The Mistress. Mandeville misrepresents 
himself in the woods. I heard him one 
night repeat "The Vision of Sir Laun- 
fal" — 

(The Fire-Tender. Which comes very 
near being our best poem.) 
— as we were crossing the lake, and the 
guides became so absorbed in it that they 
forgot to paddle, and sat listening with open 
mouths, as if it had been a panther story. 

The Parson. Mandeville likes to show 
off well enough. I heard that he related to 
a woods boy up there the whole of the Siege 
of Troy. The boy was very much inter- 
ested, and said " there 'd been a man up 
there that spring from Troy, looking up 
timber." Mandeville always carries the 
news when he goes into the country. 

Mandeville. I 'm going to take the 
Parson's sermon on Jonah next summer; 
it 's the nearest to anything like news we 've 
had from his pulpit in ten years. But, seri- 
ously, the boy was very well informed. He 'd 



138 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

heard of Albany; his father took in the 
Weekly Tribune, and he had a partial con- 
ception of Horace Greeley. 

Our Next Door. I never went so far 
out of the world in America yet that the 
name of Horace Greeley did n't rise up be- 
fore me. One of the first questions asked 
by any camp-fire is, " Did ye ever see Hor- 
ace?" 

Herbert. Which shows the power of 
the press again. But I have often remarked 
how little real conception of the moving 
world, as it is, people in remote regions get 
from the newspaper. It needs to be read in 
the midst of events. A chip cast ashore in 
a refluent eddy tells no tale of the force and 
swiftness of the current. 

Our Next Door. I don't exactly get 
the drift of that last remark ; but I rather 
like a remark that I can't understand ; like 
the landlady's indigestible bread, it stays by 
you. 

Herbert. I see that I must talk in 
words of one syllable. The newspaper has 
little effect upon the remote country mind, 
because the remote country mind is inter- 
ested in a very limited number of things. 
Besides, as the Parson says, it is conceited. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 139 

The most accomplished scholar will be the 
butt of all the guides in the woods, because 
he cannot follow a trail that would puzzle a 
sable (saple the trappers call it). 

The Parson. It 's enough to read the 
summer letters that people write to the 
newspapers from the country and the woods. 
Isolated from the activity of the world, they 
come to think that the little adventures of 
their stupid days and nights are important. 
Talk about that being real life ! Compare 
the letters such people write with the other 
contents of the newspaper, and you will see 
which life is real. That 's one reason I hate 
to have summer come, — the country letters 
set in. 

The Misteess. I should like to see 
something the Parson does n't hate to have 
come. 

Mandeville. Except his quarter's sal- 
ary, and the meeting of the American Board. 

The Fire-Tender. I don't see that we 
are getting any nearer the solution of the 
original question. The world is evidently 
interested in events simply because they are 
recent. 

Our Next Door. I have a theory that 
a newspaper might be published at little 



140 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

cost, merely by reprinting the numbers of 
years before, only altering the dates ; just 
as the Parson preaches over his sermons. 

The Fire - Tender. It 's evident we 
must have a higher order of news-gatherers. 
It has come to this, that the newspaper fur- 
nishes thought-material for all the world, 
actually prescribes from day to day the 
themes the world shall think on and talk 
about. The occupation of news-gathering 
becomes, therefore, the most important. 
When you think of it, it is astonishing that 
this department should not be in the hands 
of the ablest men, accomplished scholars, 
philosophical observers, discriminating se- 
lectors of the news of the world that is 
worth thinking over and talking about. 
The editorial comments frequently are able 
enough, but is it worth while keeping an ex- 
pensive mill going to grind chaff ? I some- 
times wonder, as I open my morning paper, 
if nothing did happen in the twenty-four 
hours except crimes, accidents, defalcations, 
deaths of unknown loafers, robberies, mon- 
strous births, — say about the level of police- 
court news. 

Our Next Door. I have even noticed 
that murders have deteriorated ; they are 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 141 

not so high-toned and mysterious as they 
used to be. 

The Fire-Tender. It is true that the 
newspapers have improved vastly within the 
last decade. 

Herbert. I think, for one, that they are 
very much above the level of the ordinary 
gossip of the country. 

The Fire-Tender. But I am tired of 
having the under- world still occupy so much 
room in the newspapers. The reporters are 
rather more alert for a dog-fight than a phil- 
ological convention. It must be that the 
good deeds of the world outnumber the bad 
in any given day; and what a good reflex 
action it would have on society if they could 
be more fully reported than the bad ! I sup- 
pose the Parson would call this the Enthusi- 
asm of Humanity. 

The Parson. You'll see how far you 
can lift yourself up by your boot- straps. 

Herbert. I wonder what influence on 
the quality (I say nothing of quantity) of 
news the coming of women into the report- 
er's and editor's work will have. 

Our Next Door. There are the baby- 
shows ; they make cheerful reading. 

The Mistress. All of them got up by 



142 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

speculating men, who impose upon the vanity 
of weak women. 

Herbert. I think women reporters are 
more given to personal details and gossip 
than the men. When I read the Washing- 
ton correspondence I am proud of my coun- 
try, to see how many Apollo Belvederes, 
Adonises, how much marble brow and pier- 
cing eye and hyacmthine locks, we have in 
the two houses of Congress. 

The Young Lady. That 's simply be- 
cause women understand the personal weak- 
ness of men ; they have a long score of per- 
sonal flattery to pay off too. 

Mandeville. I think women will bring 
in elements of brightness, picturesqueness, 
and purity very much needed. Women have 
a power of investing simple ordinary things 
with a charm ; men are bungling narrators 
compared with them. 

The Parson. The mistake they make is 
in trying to write, and especially to " stump- 
speak," like men ; next to an effeminate man 
there is nothing so disagreeable as a man- 
nish woman. 

Herbert. I heard one once address a 
legislative committee. The knowing air, the 
familiar, jocular, smart manner, the nodding 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 143 

and winking innuendoes, supposed to be 
those of a man " up to snuff " and aufait 
in political wiles, were inexpressibly comical. 
And yet the exhibition was pathetic, for it 
had the suggestive vulgarity of a woman in 
man's clothes. The imitation is always a 
dreary failure. 

The Mistress. Such women are the rare 
exceptions. I am ready to defend my sex ; 
but I won't attempt to defend both sexes in 
one. 

The Fire -Tender. I have great hope 
that women will bring into the newspaper 
an elevating influence ; the common and 
sweet life of society is much better fitted to 
entertain and instruct us than the excep- 
tional and extravagant. I confess (saving 
the Mistress's presence) that the evening 
talk over the dessert at dinner is much more 
entertaining and piquant than the morning 
paper, and often as important. 

The Mistress. I think the subject had 
better be changed. 

Mandeville. The person, not the sub- 
ject. There is no entertainment so full of 
quiet pleasure as the hearing a lady of cul- 
tivation and refinement relate her day's ex- 
perience in her daily rounds of calls, chari- 



144 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

table visits, shopping, errands of relief and 
condolence. The evening budget is better 
than the finance minister's. 

Our Next Door. That 's even so. My 
wife will pick up more news in six hours 
than I can get in a week, and I 'm fond of 
news. 

Mandeville. I don't mean gossip, by 
any means, or scandal. A woman of culture 
skims over that like a bird, never touching 
it with the tip of a wing. What she brings 
home is the freshness and brightness of life. 
She touches everything so daintily, she hits 
off a character in a sentence, she gives the 
pith of a dialogue without tediousness, she 
mimics without vulgarity ; her narration 
sparkles, but it does n't sting. The picture 
of her day is full of vivacity, and it gives 
new value and freshness to common things. 
If we could only have on the stage such ac- 
tresses as we have in the drawing-room ! 

The Fire-Tender. We want something 
more of this grace, sprightliness, and harm- 
less play of the finer life of society in the 
newspaper. 

Our Next Door. I wonder Mandeville 
does n't marry, and become a permanent sub- 
scriber to his embodied idea of a newspaper, 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 145 

The Young Lady. Perhaps he does not 
relish the idea of being unable to stop his 
subscription. 

Oue Next Dook. Parson, won't you 
please punch that fire, and give us more 
blaze ? We are getting into the darkness of 
socialism. 

Hi- 
Herbert returned to us in March. The 
Young Lady was spending the winter with 
us, and March, in spite of the calendar, 
turned out to be a winter month. It usually 
is in New England, and April too, for that 
matter. And I cannot say it is unfortunate 
for us. There are so many topics to be 
turned over and settled at our fireside that 
a winter of ordinary length would make lit- 
tle impression on the list. The fireside is, 
after all, a sort of private court of chancery, 
where nothing ever does come to a final de- 
cision. The chief effect of talk on any sub- 
ject is to strengthen one's own opinions, and, 
in fact, one never knows exactly what he 
does believe until he is warmed into convic- 
tion by the heat of attack and defence. A 
man left to himself drifts about like a boat 
on a calm lake ; it is only when the wind 
blows that the boat goes anywhere. 



146 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

Herbert said lie had been dipping into the 
recent novels written by women, here and 
there, with a view to noting the effect upon 
literature of this sudden and rather over- 
whelming accession to it. There was a good 
deal of talk about it evening after evening, 
off and on, and I can only undertake to set 
down fragments of it. 

Herbert. I should say that the distin- 
guishing feature of the literature of this day 
is the prominence women have in its produc- 
tion. They figure in most of the magazines, 
though very rarely in the scholarly and crit- 
ical reviews, and in thousands of newspa- 
pers ; to them we are indebted for the oceans 
of Sunday-school books, and they write the 
majority of the novels, the serial stories, and 
they mainly pour out the watery flood of 
tales in the weekly papers. Whether this is 
to result in more good than evil it is impos- 
sible yet to say, and perhaps it would be un- 
just to say, until this generation has worked 
off its froth, and women settle down to artis- 
tic, conscientious labor in literature. 

The Mistress. You don't mean to say 
that George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell, and 
George Sand, and Mrs. Browning before her 
marriage and severe attack of spiritism, are 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 147 

less true to art than contemporary men nov- 
elists and poets. 

Herbert. You name some exceptions 
that show the bright side of the picture, not 
only for the present, but for the future. 
Perhaps genius has no sex ; but ordinary 
talent has. I refer to the great body of 
novels, which you would know by internal 
evidence were written by women. They are 
of two sorts : the domestic story, entirely 
unidealized, and as flavorless as water-gruel ; 
and the spiced novel, generally immoral in 
tendency, in which the social problems are 
handled, unhappy marriages, affinity and pas- 
sional attraction, bigamy, and the violation 
of the seventh commandment. These sub- 
jects are treated in the rawest manner, with- 
out any settled ethics, with little discrimina- 
tion of eternal right and wrong, and with 
very little sense of responsibility for what is 
set forth. Many of these novels are merely 
the blind outbursts of a nature impatient of 
restraint and the conventionalities of society, 
and are as chaotic as the untrained minds 
that produce them. 

Mandeyille. Don't you think these nov- 
els fairly represent a social condition of un- 
rest and upheaval ? 



148 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

Herbert. Very likely ; and they help 
to create and spread abroad the discontent 
they describe. Stories of bigamy (some- 
times disguised by divorce), of unhappy 
marriages, where the injured wife, through 
an entire volume, is on the brink of falling 
into the arms of a sneaking lover, until 
death kindly removes the obstacle, and the 
two souls, who were born for each other, but 
got separated in the cradle, melt and mingle 
into one in the last chapter, are not health- 
ful reading for maids or mothers. 

The Mistress. Or men. 

The Fire-Tender. The most disagree- 
able object to me in modern literature is the 
man the women novelists have introduced as 
the leading character ; the women who come 
in contact with him seem to be fascinated by 
his disdainful mien, his giant strength, and 
his brutal manner. He is broad across the 
shoulders, heavily moulded, yet as lithe as a 
cat ; has an ugly scar across his right cheek ; 
has been in the four quarters of the globe ; 
knows seventeen languages ; had a harem in 
Turkey and a Fayaway in the Marquesas ; 
can be as polished as Bayard in the draw- 
ing-room, but is as gloomy as Conrad in the 
library ; has a terrible eye and a withering 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 149 

glance, but can be instantly subdued by a 
woman's hand, if it is not bis wife's ; and 
through all his morose and vicious career 
has carried a heart as pure as a violet. 

The Mistress. Don't you think the 
Count of Monte Cristo is the elder brother 
of Rochester ? 

The Fire-Tender. One is a mere hero 
of romance ; the other is meant for a real 
man. 

Mandeville. I don't see that the men 
novel-writers are better than the women. 

Herbert. That 's not the question ; but 
what are women who write so large a pro- 
portion of the current stories bringing into 
literature ? Aside from the question of mor- 
als, and the absolutely demoralizing manner 
of treating social questions, most of their 
stories are vapid and weak beyond expres- 
sion, and are slovenly in composition, show- 
ing neither study, training, nor mental dis- 
cipline. 

The Mistress. Considering that women 
have been shut out from the training of the 
universities, and have few opportunities for 
the wide observation that men enjoy, is n't it 
pretty well that the foremost living writers 
of fiction are women ? 



150 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

Herbert. You can say that for the mo- 
ment, since Thackeray and Dickens have 
just died. But it does not affect the general 
estimate. We are inundated with a flood 
of weak writing. Take the Sunday-school 
literature, largely the product of women ; it 
hasn't as much character as a dried-apple 
pie. I don't know what we are coming to if 
the presses keep on running. 

Our Next Door. We are living, we 
are dwelling, in a grand and awful time ; 
I 'm glad I don't write novels. 

The Parson. So am I. 

Our Next Door. I tried a Sunday- 
school book once : but I made the good boy 
end in the poor-house, and the bad boy go to 
Congress ; and the publisher said it would 
n't do, the public would n't stand that sort 
of thing. Nobody but the good go to Con- 
gress. 

The Mistress. Herbert, what do you 
think women are good for ? 

Our Next Door. That 's a poser. 

Herbert. Well, I think they are in a 
tentative state as to literature, and we can- 
not yet tell what they will do. Some of our 
most brilliant books of travel, correspon- 
dence, and writing on topics in which their 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 151 

sympathies have warmly interested them are 
by women. Some of them are also strong 
writers in the daily journals. 

Mandeville. I 'm not sure there 's any- 
thing a woman cannot do as well as a man, 
if she sets her heart on it. 

The Parson. That 's because she 's no 
conscience. 

Chorus. Oh, Parson ! 

The Parson. Well, it doesn't trouble 
her, if she wants to do anything. She looks 
at the end, not the means. A woman, set 
on anything, will walk right through the 
moral crockery without wincing. She 'd be 
a great deal more unscrupulous in politics 
than the average man. Did you ever see 
a female lobbyist ? Or a criminal ? It is 
Lady Macbeth who does not falter. Don't 
raise your hands at me ! The sweetest an- 
gel or the coolest devil is a woman. I see 
in some of the modern novels we have been 
talking of the same unscrupulous daring, a 
blindness to moral distinctions, a constant 
exaltation of a passion into a virtue, an 
entire disregard of the immutable laws on 
which the family and society rest. And you 
ask lawyers and trustees how scrupulous 
women are in business transactions ! 



152 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

The Fire-Tender. Women are often 
ignorant of affairs, and, besides, they may 
have a notion often that a woman ought to 
be privileged more than a man in business 
matters ; but I tell you, as a rule, that if 
men would consult their wives, they would 
go a deal straighter in business operations 
than they do go. 

The Parson. We are all poor sinners. 
But I 've another indictment against the 
women writers. We get no good old-fash- 
ioned love stories from them. It 's either a 
quarrel of discordant natures — one a pan- 
ther and the other a polar bear — for court- 
ship, until one of them is crippled by a rail- 
way accident ; or a long wrangle of married 
life between two unpleasant people, who can 
neither live comfortably together nor apart. 
I suppose, by what I see, that sweet wooing, 
with all its torturing and delightful uncer- 
tainty, still goes on in the world ; and I have 
no doubt that the majority of married peo- 
ple live more happily than the unmarried. 
But it 's easier to find a dodo than a new 
and good love-story. 

Mandeville. I suppose the old style of 
plot is exhausted. Everything in man and 
outside of him has been turned over so often 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 153 

that I should think the novelists would cease 
simply from want of material. 

The Pakson. Plots are no more ex- 
hausted than men are. Every man is a new 
creation, and combinations are simply end- 
less. Even if we did not have new material 
in the daily change of society, and there 
were only a fixed number of incidents and 
characters in life, invention could not be ex- 
hausted on them. I amuse myself some- 
times with my kaleidoscope, but I can never 
reproduce a figure. No, no. I cannot say 
that you may not exhaust everything else : 
we may get all the secrets of a nature into a 
book by and by, but the novel is immortal, 
for it deals with men. 

The Parson's vehemence came very near 
carrying him into a sermon ; and as nobody 
has the privilege of replying to his sermons, 
so none of the circle made any reply now. 

Our Next Door mumbled something about 
his hair standing on end, to hear a minister 
defending the novel ; but it did not interrupt 
the general silence. Silence is unnoticed 
when people sit before a fire; it would be 
intolerable if they sat and looked at each 
other. 

The wind had risen during the evening, 



154 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

and Mandeville remarked, as they rose to 
go, that it had a spring sound in it, but it 
was as cold as winter. The Mistress said 
she heard a bird that morning singing in 
the sun ; it was a winter bird, but it sang a 
spring song. 



SEVENTH STUDY. 

We have been much interested in what is 
called the Gothic revival. We have spent 
I don't know how many evenings in looking 
over Herbert's plans for a cottage, and have 
been amused with his vain efforts to cover 
with Gothic roofs the vast number of large 
rooms which the Young Lady draws in her 
sketch of a small house. 

I have no doubt that the Gothic, which is 
capable of infinite modification, so that every 
house built in that style may be as different 
from every other house as one tree is from 
every other, can be adapted to our modern 
uses, and will be, when artists catch its 
spirit instead of merely copying its old 
forms. But just now we are taking the Gothic 
very literally, as we took the Greek at one 
time, or as we should probably have taken 
the Saracenic, if the Moors had not been 
colored. Not even the cholera is so conta- 
gious in this country as a style of architecture 
which we happen to catch ; the country is 



156 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

just now broken out all over with the Man- 
sard-roof epidemic. 

And in secular architecture we do not 
study what is adapted to our climate any 
more than in ecclesiastic architecture we 
adopt that which is suited to our religion. 

We are building a great many costly 
churches here and there, we Protestants, and 
as the most of them are ill adapted to our 
forms of worship, it may be necessary and 
best for us to change our religion in order to 
save our investments. I am aware that this 
would be a grave step, and we should not 
hasten to throw overboard Luther and the 
right of private judgment without reflec- 
tion. And yet, if it is necessary to revive 
the ecclesiastical Gothic architecture, not 
in its spirit (that we nowhere do), but in 
the form which served another age and an- 
other faith, and if, as it appears, we have 
already a great deal of money invested in 
this reproduction, it may be more prudent to 
go forward than to go back. The question 
is, " Cannot one easier change his creed than 
his pew ? " 

I occupy a seat in church which is an ad- 
mirable one for reflection, but I cannot see 
or hear much that is going on in what we 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 157 

like to call the apse. There is a splendid 
stone pillar, a clustered column, right in 
front of me, and I am as much protected 
from the minister as Old Put's troops were 
from the British, behind the stone wall at 
Bunker's Hill. I can hear his voice occa- 
sionally wandering round in the arches over- 
head, and I recognize the tone, because he is 
a friend of mine and an excellent man, but 
what he is saying I can very seldom make 
out. If there was any incense burning I 
could smell it, and that would be something. 
I rather like the smell of incense, and it has 
its holy associations. But there is no smell 
in our church, except of bad air, — for there 
is no provision for ventilation in the splen- 
did and costly edifice. The reproduction of 
the old Gothic is so complete that the build- 
ers even seem to have brought over the an- 
cient air from one of the churches of the 
Middle Ages, — you would declare it had 
n't been changed in two centuries. 

I am expected to fix my attention during 
the service upon one man, who stands in the 
centre of the apse and has a sounding-board 
behind him in order to throw his voice out 
of the sacred semicircular space (where the 
altar used to stand, but now the sounding* 



158 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

board takes the place of the altar) and scat- 
ter it over the congregation at large, and 
send it echoing up in the groined roof. I 
always like to hear a minister who is unfa- 
miliar with the house, and who has a loud 
voice, try to fill the edifice. The more he 
roars and gives himself with vehemence to 
the effort, the more the building roars in in- 
distinguishable noise and hubbub. By the 
time he has said (to suppose a case), " The 
Lord is in his holy temple," and has passed 
on to say, " let all the earth keep silence," 
the building is repeating " The Lord is in 
his holy temple " from half a dozen different 
angles and altitudes, rolling it and growling 
it, and is not keeping silence at all. A man 
who understands it waits until the house has 
had its say, and has digested one passage, 
before he launches another into the vast, 
echoing spaces. I am expected, as I said, 
to fix my eye and mind on the minister, the 
central point of the service. But the pillar 
hides him. Now if there were several minis- 
ters in the church, dressed in such gorgeous 
colors that I could see them at the distance 
from the apse in which my limited income 
compels me to sit, and candles were burning, 
and censers were swinging, and the platform 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 159 

was full of the sacred bustle of a gorgeous 
ritual worship, and a bell rang to tell me the 
holy moments, I should not mind the pillar 
at all. I should sit there, like any other 
Goth, and enjoy it. But, as I have said, the 
pastor is a friend of mine, and I like to look 
at him on Sunday, and hear what he says, 
for he always says something worth hearing. 
I am on such terms with him, indeed we all 
are, that it would be pleasant to have the 
service of a little more social nature, and 
more human. When we put him away off 
in the apse, and set him up for a Goth, and 
then seat ourselves at a distance, scattered 
about among the pillars, the whole thing 
seems to me a trifle unnatural. Though I 
do not mean to say that the congregations 
do not " enjoy their religion " in their splen- 
did edifices which cost so much money and 
are really so beautiful. 

A good many people have the idea, so it 
seems, that Gothic architecture and Chris- 
tianity are essentially one and the same 
thing ; just as many regard it as an act of 
piety to work an altar cloth or to cushion a 
pulpit. It may be, and it may not be. 

Our Gothic church is likely to prove to us 
a valuable religious experience, bringing out 



160 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

many of the Christian virtues. It may have 
had its origin in pride, but it is all being 
overruled for our good. Of course I need 
n't explain that it is the thirteenth-century 
ecclesiastic Gothic that is epidemic in this 
country ; and I think it has attacked the 
Congregational and the other non - ritual 
churches more violently than any others. 
We have had it here in its most beautiful 
and dangerous forms. I believe we are 
pretty much all of us supplied with a Gothic 
church now. Such has been the enthusiasm 
in this devout direction that I should not be 
surprised to see our rich private citizens put 
ting up Gothic churches for their individual 
amusement and sanctification. As the day 
will probably come when every man in Hart- 
ford will live in his own mammoth, five-story 
granite insurance building, it may not be 
unreasonable to expect that every man will 
sport his own Gothic church. It is begin- 
ning to be discovered that the Gothic sort 
of church edifice is fatal to the Congrega- 
tional style of worship that has been preva- 
lent here in New England ; but it will do 
nicely (as they say in Boston) for private 
devotion. 

There is n't a finer or purer church than 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 161 

ours anywhere, inside and outside, Gothic to 
the last. The elevation of the nave gives 
it even that " high-shouldered " appearance 
which seemed more than anything else to 
impress Mr. Hawthorne in the cathedral at 
Amiens. I fancy that for genuine high- 
shoulderness we are not exceeded by any 
church in the city. Our chapel in the rear 
is as Gothic as the rest of it, — a beautiful 
little edifice. The committee forgot to make 
any more provision for ventilating that than 
the church, and it takes a pretty well-sea- 
soned Christian to stay in it long at a time. 
The Sunday-school is held there, and it is 
thought to be best to accustom the children 
to bad air before they go into the church. 
The poor little dears should n't have the 
wickedness and impurity of this world break 
on them too suddenly. If the stranger no- 
ticed any lack about our church, it would be 
that of a spire. There is a place for one ; 
indeed, it was begun, and then the builders 
seem to have stopped, with the notion that 
it would grow itself from such a good root. 
It is a mistake, however, to suppose that we 
do not know that the church has what the 
profane here call a " stump-tail " appear- 
ance. But the profane are as ignorant of 



162 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

history as they are of true Gothic. All the 
Old World cathedrals were the work of cen- 
turies. That at Milan is scarcely finished 
yet; the unfinished spires of the Cologne 
cathedral are one of the best-known features 
of it. I doubt if it would be in the Gothic 
spirit to finish a church at once. We can 
tell cavillers that we shall have a spire at 
the proper time, and not a minute before. 
It may depend a little upon what the Bap- 
tists do, who are to build near us. I, for 
one, think we had better wait and see how 
high the Baptist spire is before we run ours 
up. The church is everything that could be 
desired inside. There is the nave, with its 
lofty and beautiful arched ceiling ; there are 
the side aisles, and two elegant rows of stone 
pillars, stained so as to be a perfect imita- 
tion of stucco ; there is the apse, with its 
stained glass and exquisite lines ; and there 
is an organ-loft over the front entrance, 
with a rose window. Nothing was wanting, 
so far as we could see, except that we should 
adapt ourselves to the circumstances; and 
that we have been trying to do ever since. 
It may be well to relate how we do it, for 
the benefit of other inchoate Goths. 

It was found that if we put up the organ 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 163 

in the loft, it would hide the beautiful rose 
window. Besides, we wanted congregational 
singing, and if we hired a choir, and hung it 
up there under the roof, like a cage of birds, 
we should not have congregational singing. 
We therefore left the organ-loft vacant, 
making no further use of it than to satisfy 
our Gothic cravings. As for choir, several 
of the singers of the church volunteered to 
sit together in the front side-seats, and as 
there was no place for an organ, they gal- 
lantly rallied round a melodeon, — or per- 
haps it is a cabinet organ, — a charming in- 
strument, and, as everybody knows, entirely 
in keeping with the pillars, arches, and great 
spaces of a real Gothic edifice. It is the 
union of simplicity with grandeur, for which 
we have all been looking. I need not say 
to those who have ever heard a melodeon 
that there is nothing like it. It is rare, 
even in the finest churches on the Continent. 
And we had congregational singing. And it 
went very well indeed. One of the advan- 
tages of pure congregational singing is that 
you can join in the singing whether you 
have a voice or not. The disadvantage is 
that your neighbor can do the same. It is 
strange what an uncommonly poor lot of 



164 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

voices there is, even among good people. 
But we enjoy it. If you do not enjoy it, 
you can change your seat until you get 
among a good lot. 

So far, everything went well. But it was 
next discovered that it was difficult to hear 
the minister, who had a very handsome little 
desk in the apse, somewhat distant from the 
bulk of the congregation ; still, we could 
most of us see him on a clear day. The 
church was admirably built for echoes, and 
the centre of the house was very favorable to 
them. When you sat in the centre of the 
house, it sometimes seemed as if three or 
four ministers were speaking. It is usually 
so in cathedrals ; the Right Reverend So- 
and-So is assisted by the very Reverend Such- 
and-Such, and the good deal Reverend Thus- 
and-Thus, and so on. But a good deal of the 
minister's voice appeared to go up into the 
groined arches, and, as there was no one up 
there, some of his best things were lost. We 
also had a notion that some of it went into 
the cavernous organ-loft. It would have 
been all right if there had been a choir 
there, for choirs usually need more preach- 
ing, and pay less heed to it, than any other 
part of the congregation. Well, we drew a 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 165 

sort of screen over the organ-loft; but the 
result was not as marked as we had hoped. 
We next devised a sounding-board, — a sort 
of mammoth clam-shell, painted white, and 
erected it behind the minister. It had a 
good effect on the minister. It kept him 
up straight to his work. So long as he kept 
his head exactly in the focus, his voice went 
out and did not return to him ; but if he 
moved either way he was assailed by a Babel 
of clamoring echoes. There was no opportu- 
nity for him to splurge about from side to side 
of the pulpit, as some do. And if he raised 
his voice much, or attempted any extra flights, 
he was liable to be drowned in a refluent sea 
of his own eloquence. And he could hear 
the congregation as well as they could hear 
him. All the coughs, whispers, noises, were 
gathered in the wooden tympanum behind 
him, and poured into his ears. 

But the sounding-board was an improve- 
ment, and we advanced to bolder measures ; 
having heard a little, we wanted to hear more. 
Besides, those who sat in front began to 
be discontented with the melodeon. There 
are depths in music which the melodeon, 
even when it is called a cabinet organ, with 
a colored boy at the bellows, cannot sound. 



166 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

The melodeon was not, originally, designed 
for the Gothic worship. We determined to 
have an organ, and we speculated whether, 
by erecting it in the apse, we could not fill 
up that elegant portion of the church, and 
compel the preacher's voice to leave it, and 
go out over the pews. It would of course 
do something to efface the main beauty of a 
Gothic church ; but something must be done, 
and we began a series of experiments to test 
the probable effects of putting the organ and 
choir behind the minister. We moved the 
desk to the very front of the platform, and 
erected behind it a high, square board screen, 
like a section of tight fence round the fair- 
grounds. This did help matters. The min- 
ister spoke with more ease, and we could 
hear him better. If the screen had been 
intended to stay there, we should have agi- 
tated the subject of painting it. But this 
was only an experiment. 

Our next move was to shove the screen 
back and mount the volunteer singers, melo- 
deon and all, upon the platform, — some 
twenty of them crowded together behind 
the minister. The effect was beautiful. It 
seemed as if we had taken care to select the 
finest-looking people in the congregation, — . 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 167 

much to the injury of the congregation, of 
course, as seen from the platform. There 
are few congregations that can stand this 
sort of culling, though ours can endure it as 
well as any ; yet it devolves upon those of 
us who remain the responsibility of looking 
as well as we can. The experiment was a 
success, so far as appearances went, but 
when the screen went back the minister's 
voice went back with it. We could not hear 
him very well, though we could hear the choir 
as plain as day. We have thought of rem- 
edying this last defect by putting the high 
screen in front of the singers, and close to 
the minister, as it was before. This would 
make the singers invisible, — " though lost 
to sight, to memory dear," — what is some- 
times called an " angel choir," when the 
singers (and the melodeon) are concealed, 
with the most subdued and religious effect. 
It is often so in cathedrals. 

This plan would have another advantage. 
The singers on the platform, all handsome 
and well dressed, distract our attention from 
the minister, and what he is saying. We 
cannot help looking at them, studying all 
the faces and all the dresses. If one of them 
sits up very straight, he is a rebuke to us ; 



168 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

if he " lops " over, we wonder why he does n't 
sit up ; if his hair is white, we wonder 
whether it is age or family peculiarity ; if 
he yawns, we want to yawn ; if he takes up 
a hymn-book, we wonder if he is uninterested 
in the sermon ; we look at the bonnets, and 
query if that is the latest spring style, or 
whether we are to look for another; if he 
shaves close, we wonder why he does n't let 
his beard grow ; if he has long whiskers, we 
wonder why he does n't trim 'em ; if she 
sighs, we feel sorry ; if she smiles, we would 
like to know what it is about. And then 
suppose any of the singers should ever want 
to eat fennel, or peppermints, or Brown's 
troches, and pass them round ! Suppose the 
singers, more or less of them, should sneeze ! 
Suppose one or two of them, as the hand- 
somest people sometimes will, should go to 
sleep ! In short, the singers there take away 
all our attention from the minister, and 
would do so if they were the homeliest peo- 
ple in the world. We must try something 
else. 

It is needless to explain that a Gothic 
religious life is not an idle one. 



EIGHTH STUDY. 

I. 

Perhaps the clothes question is exhausted, 
philosophically. I cannot but regret that 
the Poet of the Breakfast-Table, who ap- 
pears to have an uncontrollable penchant for 
saying the things you would like to say your- 
self, has alluded to the anachronism of " Sir 
Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton- 
chop whiskers and the plain gray suit." A 
great many scribblers have felt the disad- 
vantage of writing after Montaigne ; and 
it is impossible to tell how much originality 
in others Dr. Holmes has destroyed in this 
country. In whist there are some men you 
always prefer to have on your left hand, and 
I take it that this intuitive essayist, who is 
so alert to seize the few remaining unappro- 
priated ideas and analogies in the world, is 
one of them. 

No doubt if the Plantagenets of this day 
were required to dress in a suit of chain- 
armor and wear iron pots on their heads, 



170 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

they would be as ridiculous as most tragedy 
actors on the stage. The pit which recog- 
nizes Snooks in his tin breastplate and helmet 
laughs at him, and Snooks himself feels like 
a sheep ; and when the great tragedian 
comes on, shining in mail, dragging a two- 
handed sword, and mouths the grandilo- 
quence which poets have put into the speech 
of heroes, the dress-circle requires all its 
good-breeding and its feigned love of the 
traditionary drama not to titter. 

If this sort of acting, which is supposed 
to have come down to us from the Eliza- 
bethan age, and which culminated in the 
school of the Keans, Kembles, and Siddonses, 
ever had any fidelity to life, it must have 
been in a society as artificial as the prose of 
Sir Philip Sidney. That anybody ever be- 
lieved in it is difficult to think, especially 
when we read what privileges the fine beaux 
and gallants of the town took behind the 
scenes and on the stage in the golden days 
of the drama. When a part of the audience 
sat on the stage, and gentlemen lounged or 
reeled across it in the midst of a play, to 
speak to acquaintances in the audience, the 
illusion could not have been very strong. 

Now and then a genius, like Rachel as 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 171 

Horatia, or Hackett as Falstaff, may actually 
seem to be the character assumed by virtue 
of a transforming imagination, but I sup- 
pose the fact to be that getting into a cos- 
tume, absurdly antiquated and remote from 
all the habits and associations of the actor, 
largely accounts for the incongruity and ri- 
diculousness of most of our modern acting. 
Whether what is called the " legitimate 
drama " ever was legitimate we do not know, 
but the advocates of it appear to think that 
the theatre was some time cast in a mould, 
once for all, and is good for all times and 
peoples, like the propositions of Euclid. To 
our eyes the legitimate drama of to-day is 
the one in which the day is reflected, both in 
costume and speech, and which touches the 
affections, the passions, the humor, of the 
present time. The brilliant success of the 
few good plays that have been written out 
of the rich life which we now live — the 
most varied, fruitful, and dramatically sug- 
gestive — ought to rid us forever of the bus- 
kin-fustian, except as a pantomimic or spec- 
tacular curiosity. 

We have no objection to Julius Caesar or 
Richard III. stalking about in impossible 
clothes, and stepping four feet at a stride, if 



172 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

they want to, but let them not claim to he 
more " legitimate " than " Ours " or " Rip 
Van Winkle." There will probably be some 
orator for years and years to come, at every 
Fourth of July, who will go on asking, 
Where is Thebes ? but he does not care any- 
thing about it, and he does not really expect 
an answer. I have sometimes wished I knew 
the exact site of Thebes, so that I could rise 
in the audience, and stop that question, at 
any rate. It is legitimate, but it is tiresome. 
If we went to the bottom of this subject, I 
think we should find that the putting upon 
actors clothes to which they are unaccus- 
tomed makes them act and talk artificially, 
and often in a manner intolerable. An ac- 
tor who has not the habits or instincts of a 
gentleman cannot be made to appear like 
one on the stage by dress ; he only carica- 
tures and discredits what he tries to repre- 
sent ; and the unaccustomed clothes and sit- 
uation make him much more unnatural and 
insufferable than he would otherwise be. 
Pressed appropriately for parts for which he 
is fitted, he will act well enough, probably. 
What I mean is that the clothes inappro- 
priate to the man make the incongruity of 
him and his part more apparent. Vulgarity 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 173 

is never so conspicuous as in fine apparel, on 
or off the stage, and never so self-conscious. 
Shall we have, then, no refined characters 
on the stage ? Yes ; but let them be taken 
by men and women of taste and refinement, 
and let us have done with this masquerading 
in false raiment, ancient and modern, which 
makes nearly every stage a travesty of na- 
ture and the whole theatre a painful pre- 
tension. We do not expect the modern the- 
atre to be a place of instruction (that busi- 
ness is now turned over to the telegraphic 
operator who is making a new language), but 
it may give amusement instead of torture, 
and do a little in satirizing folly and kin- 
dling love of home and country by the way. 

This is a sort of summary of what we all 
said, and no one in particular is responsible 
for it ; and in this it is like public opinion. 
The Parson, however, whose only experience 
of the theatre was the endurance of an ora- 
torio once, was very cordial in his denuncia- 
tion of the stage altogether. 

Mandeville. Yet, acting itself is de- 
lightful ; nothing so entertains us as mim- 
icry, the personation of character. We enjoy 
it in private. I confess that I am always 
pleased with the Parson in the character of 



174 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

grumbler. He would be an immense sue* 
cess on the stage. I don't know but the 
theatre will have to go back into the hands 
of the priests, who once controlled it. 

The Parson. Scoffer! 

Mandeville. I can imagine how enjoy- 
able the stage might be, cleared of all 
its traditionary nonsense, stilted language, 
stilted behavior, all the rubbish of false sen- 
timent, false dress, and the manners of times 
that were both artificial and immoral, and 
filled with living characters, who speak the 
thought of to-day, with the wit and culture 
that are current to-day. I 've seen private 
theatricals, where all the performers were 
persons of cultivation, that — 

Our Next Door. So have I. For some- 
thing particularly cheerful, commend me to 
amateur theatricals. I have passed some 
melancholy hours at them. 

Mandeville. That's because the per- 
formers acted the worn stage plays, and at- 
tempted to do them in the manner they had 
seen on the stage. It is not always so. 

The Fire-Tender. I suppose Mandeville 
would say that acting has got into a manner- 
ism which is well described as stagey ; and 
is supposed to be natural to the stage, just 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 175 

as half the modern poets write in a recog- 
nized form of literary manufacture, without 
the least impulse from within, and not with 
the purpose of saying anything, but of turn- 
ing out a piece of literary work. That 's the 
reason we have so much poetry that im- 
presses one like sets of faultless cabinet-fur- 
niture made by machinery. 

The Parson. But you need n't talk of 
nature or naturalness in acting or in any- 
thing. I tell you nature is poor stuff. It 
can't go alone. Amateur acting — they get 
it up at church sociables nowadays — is apt 
to be as near nature as a school-boy's decla- 
mation. Acting is the Devil's art. 

The Mistress. Do you object to such 
innocent amusement ? 

Mandeville. What the Parson objects 
to is that he is n't amused. 

The Parson. What 's the use of object- 
ing ? It 's the fashion of the day to amuse 
people into the kingdom of heaven. 

Herbert. The Parson has got us off the 
track. My notion about the stage is that it 
keeps along pretty evenly with the rest of 
the world ; the stage is usually quite up to 
the level of the audience. Assumed dress 
on the stage, since you were speaking of 



176 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

that, makes people no more constrained and 
self-conscious than it does off the stage. 

The Mistkess. What sarcasm is coming 
now? 

Hekbeet. Well, you may laugh, but the 
world has n't got used to good clothes yet. 
The majority do not wear them with ease. 
People who only put on their best on rare 
and stated occasions step into an artificial 
feeling. 

Our Next Door. I wonder if that 's the 
reason the Parson finds it so difficult to get 
hold of his congregation. 

Herbert. I don't know how else to ac- 
count for the formality and vapidity of a set 
"party," where all the guests are clothed in 
a manner to which they are unaccustomed, 
dressed into a condition of vivid self-con- 
sciousness. The same people, who know each 
other perfectly well, will enjoy themselves 
together without restraint in their ordinary 
apparel. But nothing can be more artificial 
than the behavior of people together who 
rarely " dress up." It seems impossible to 
make the conversation as fine as the clothes, 
and so it dies in a kind of inane helplessness. 
Especially is this true in the country, where 
people have not obtained the mastery of 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 177 

their clothes that those who live in the city 
have. It is really absurd, at this stage of 
our civilization, that we should be so affected 
by such an insignificant accident as dress. 
Perhaps Mandeville can tell us whether this 
clothes panic prevails in the older societies. 

The Parson. Don't. We 've heard it ; 
about its being one of the Englishman's 
thirty-nine articles that he never shall sit 
down to dinner without a dress-coat, and all 
that. 

The Mistress. I wish, for my part, that 
everybody who has time to eat a dinner 
would dress for that, the principal event of 
the day, and do respectful and leisurely 
justice to it. 

The Young Lady. It has always seemed 
singular to me that men who work so hard 
to build elegant houses, and have good din- 
ners, should take so little leisure to enjoy 
either. 

Mandeville. If the Parson will permit 
me, I should say that the chief clothes ques- 
tion abroad just now is, how to get any ; and 
it is the same with the dinners. 



178 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

II. 

It is quite unnecessary to say that the talk 
about clothes ran into the question of dress 
reform, and ran out, of course. You cannot 
converse on anything nowadays that you do 
not run into some reform. The Parson says 
that everybody is intent on reforming every- 
thing but himself. We are all trying to 
associate ourselves to make everybody else 
behave as we do. Said 

Our Next Door. Dress reform ! As if 
people could n't change their clothes with- 
out concert of action. Resolved, that no- 
body should put on a clean collar oftener 
than his neighbor does. I 'm sick of every 
sort of reform. I should like to retrograde 
awhile. Let a dyspeptic ascertain that he 
can eat porridge three times a day and live, 
and straightway he insists that everybody 
ought to eat porridge and nothing else. I 
mean to get up a society every member of 
which shall be pledged to do just as he 
pleases. 

The Parson. That would be the most 
radical reform of the day. That would be 
independence. If people dressed according 
to their means, acted according to their con- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 179 

victions, and avowed their opinions, it would 
revolutionize society. 

Our Next Door. I should like to walk 
into your church some Sunday and see the 
changes under such conditions. 

The Parson. It might give you a novel 
sensation to walk in at any time. And I 'm 
not sure but the church would suit your re- 
trograde ideas. It 's so Gothic that a Chris- 
tian of the Middle Ages, if he were alive, 
could n't see or hear in it. 

Herbert. I don't know whether these 
reformers who carry the world on their 
shoulders in such serious fashion, especially 
the little fussy fellows, who are themselves 
the standard of the regeneration they seek, 
are more ludicrous than pathetic. 

The Fire - Tender. Pathetic, by all 
means. But I don't know that they would 
be pathetic if they were not ludicrous. There 
are those reform singers who have been pip- 
ing away so sweetly now for thirty years, 
with never any diminution of cheerful, pa- 
tient enthusiasm ; their hair growing longer 
and longer, their eyes brighter and brighter, 
and their faces, I do believe, sweeter and 
sweeter ; singing always with the same con- 
stancy for the slave, for the drunkard, for 



180 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the snuff-taker, for the suffragist, " There's- 
a-good-time-com-ing-boys (nothing offensive 
is intended by " boys ; " it is put in for 
euphony, and sung pianissimo, not to offend 
the suffragists), it 's-almost-here." And what 
a brightening up of their faces there is when 
they say, " it 's-al-most-here," not doubting 
for a moment that "it's" coming to-mor- 
row; and the accompanying melodeon also 
wails its wheezy suggestion that " it 's-al- 
most-here," that " good-time " (delayed so 
long, waiting perhaps for the invention of 
the melodeon) when we shall all sing and 
all play that cheerful instrument, and all 
vote, and none shall smoke, or drink, or eat 
meat, "boys." I declare it almost makes 
me cry to hear them, so touching is their 
faith in the midst of a jeering world. 

Herbert. I suspect that no one can be 
a genuine reformer and not be ridiculous. I 
mean those who give themselves up to the 
unction of the reform. 

The Mistress. Does n't that depend 
upon whether the reform is large or petty ? 

The Fire-Tender. I should say rather 
that the reforms attracted to them all the 
ridiculous people, who almost always manage 
to become the most conspicuous. I suppose 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 181 

that nobody dare write out all that was ludi- 
crous in the great abolition movement. But 
it was not at all comical to those most zeal- 
ous in it ; they never could see — more 's 
the pity, for thereby they lose much — the 
humorous side of their performances, and 
that is why the pathos overcomes one's sense 
of the absurdity of such people. 

The Young Lady. It is lucky for the 
world that so many are willing to be ab- 
surd. 

Heebeet. Well, I think that, in the 
main, the reformers manage to look out for 
themselves tolerably well. I knew once a 
lean and faithful agent of a great philan- 
thropic scheme, who contrived to collect 
every year for the cause just enough to sup- 
port him at a good hotel comfortably. 

The Misteess. That 's identifying one's 
self with the cause. 

Mandeville. You remember the great 
free-soil convention at Buffalo, in 1848, when 
Van Buren was nominated. All the world 
of hope and discontent went there, with its 
projects of reform. There seemed to be no 
doubt, among hundreds that attended it, that 
if they could get a resolution passed that 
bread should be buttered on both sides, that 



182 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

it would be so buttered. The platform pro- 
vided for every want and every woe. 

The Fire-Tender. I remember. If you 
could get the millennium by political action, 
we should have had it then. 

Mandeville. We went there on the 
Erie Canal, the exciting and fashionable 
mode of travel in those days. I was a boy 
when we began the voyage. The boat was 
full of conventionists ; all the talk was of 
what must be done there. I got the impres- 
sion that as that boat-load went so would go 
the convention ; and I was not alone in that 
feeling. I can never be enough grateful 
for one little scrubby fanatic who was on 
board, who spent most of his time in draft- 
ing resolutions and reading them privately 
to the passengers. He was a very enthu- 
siastic, nervous, and somewhat dirty little 
man, who wore a woollen muffler about his 
throat, although it was summer ; he had 
nearly lost his voice, and could only speak 
in a hoarse, disagreeable whisper, and he al- 
ways carried a teacup about, containing some 
sticky compound which he stirred frequently 
with a spoon, and took, whenever he talked, 
in order to improve his voice. If he was 
separated from his cup for ten minutes his 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 183 

whisper became inaudible. I greatly de- 
lighted in him, for I never saw any one who 
had so much enjoyment of his own impor- 
tance. He was fond of telling what he would 
do if the convention rejected such and such 
resolutions. He 'd make it hot for 'em. I 
did n't know but he 'd make them take his 
mixture. The convention had got to take a 
stand on tobacco, for one thing. He 'd heard 
Giddings took snuff ; he 'd see. When we 
at length reached Buffalo he took his tea- 
cup and carpet-bag of resolutions and went 
ashore in a great hurry. I saw him once 
again in a cheap restaurant, whispering a 
resolution to another delegate, but he did n't 
appear in the convention. I have often 
wondered what became of him. 

Our Next Door. Probably he 's consul 
somewhere. They mostly are. 

The Fire-Tender. After all, it's the 
easiest thing in the world to sit and sneer at 
eccentricities. But what a dead and uninter- 
esting world it would be if we were all 
proper, and kept within the lines ! Affairs 
would soon be reduced to mere machinery. 
There are moments, even days, when all in- 
terests and movements appear to be settled 
upon some universal plan of equilibrium; 



184 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

but just then some restless and absurd per* 
son is inspired to throw the machine out of 
gear. These individual eccentricities seem 
to be the special providences in the general 
human scheme. 

Herbert. They make it very hard work 
for the rest of us, who are disposed to go 
along peaceably and smoothly. 

Mandeville. And stagnate. I 'm not 
sure but the natural condition of this planet 
is war, and that when it is finally towed to 
its anchorage — if the universe has any har- 
bor for worlds out of commission — it will 
look like the Fighting Temeraire in Tur- 
ner's picture. 

Herbert. There is another'thing I should 
like to understand : the tendency of people 
who take up one reform, perhaps a personal 
regeneration in regard to some bad habit, to 
run into a dozen other isms, and get all at 
sea in several vague and pernicious theories 
and practices. 

Mandeville. Herbert seems to think 
there is safety in a man's being anchored, 
even if it is to a bad habit. 

Herbert. Thank you. But what is it 
in human nature that is apt to carry a man 
who may take a step in personal reform into 
so many extremes ? 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 185 

Our Next Door. Probably it 's human 
nature. 

Herbert. Why, for instance, should a 
reformed drunkard (one of the noblest ex- 
amples of victory over self) incline, as I have 
known the reformed to do, to spiritism, or a 
woman suffragist to " pantarchism " (what- 
ever that is), and want to pull up all the 
roots of society, and expect them to grow in 
the air, like orchids ; or a Graham-bread dis- 
ciple become enamored of Communism ? 

Mandeville. I know an excellent Con- 
servative who would, I think, suit you ; he 
says that he does not see how a man who in- 
dulges in the theory and practice of total ab- 
stinence can be a consistent believer in the 
Christian religion. 

Herbert. Well, I can understand what 
he means : that a person is bound to hold 
himself in conditions of moderation and con- 
trol, using and not abusing the things of this 
world, practising temperance, not retiring 
into a convent of artificial restrictions in 
order to escape the full responsibility of self- 
control. And yet his theory would certainly 
wreck most men and women. What does 
the Parson say ? 

The Parson. That the world is going 



186 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

crazy on the notion of individual ability. 
Whenever a man attempts to reform him- 
self, or anybody else, without the aid of the 
Christian religion, he is sure to go adrift, 
and is pretty certain to be blown about by 
absurd theories, and shipwrecked on some 
pernicious ism. 

The Fire-Tender. I think the discus- 
sion has touched bottom. 



III. 

I never felt so much the value of a house 
with a backlog in it as during the late 
spring ; for its lateness was its main feature. 
Everybody was grumbling about it, as if 
it were something ordered from the tailor, 
and not ready on the day. Day after day 
it snowed, night after night it blew a gale 
from the northwest ; the frost sunk deeper 
and deeper into the ground; there was a 
popular longing for spring that was almost 
a prayer; the weather bureau was active; 
Easter was set a week earlier than the year 
before, but nothing seemed to do any good. 
The robins sat under the evergreens, and 
piped in a disconsolate mood, and at last the 
blue jays came and scolded in the midst of 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 187 

the snow-storm, as they always do scold in 
any weather. The crocuses couldn't be 
coaxed to come up, even with a pickaxe. 
I 'm almost ashamed now to recall what we 
said of the weather, only I think that peo- 
ple are no more accountable for what they 
say of the weather than for their remarks 
when their corns are stepped on. 

We agreed, however, that, but for disap- 
pointed expectations and the prospect of late 
lettuce and peas, we were gaining by the fire 
as much as we were losing by the frost. And 
the Mistress fell to chanting the comforts of 
modern civilization. 

The Fire-Tender said he should like to 
know, by the way, if our civilization differed 
essentially from any other in anything but 
its comforts. 

Herbert. We are no nearer religious 
unity. 

The Parson. We have as much war as 
ever. 

Mandeville. There was never such a 
social turmoil. 

The Young Lady. The artistic part of 
our nature does not appear to have grown. 

The Fire-Tender. We are quarrelling 
as to whether we are in fact radically differ- 
ent from the brutes. 



188 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

Hekbert. Scarcely two people think 
alike about the proper kind of human gov- 
ernment. 

The Parson. Our poetry is made out of 
words, for the most part, and not drawn 
from the living sources. 

Our Next Door. And Mr. dimming 
is uncorking his seventh phial. I never felt 
before what barbarians we are. 

The Mistress. Yet you won't deny 
that the life of the average man is safer and 
every w r ay more comfortable than it was 
even a century ago. 

The Fire-Tender. But what I want to 
know is, whether what we call our civiliza- 
tion has done anything more for mankind at 
large than to increase the ease and pleasure 
of living. Science has multiplied wealth 
and facilitated intercourse, and the result is 
refinement of manners and a diffusion of 
education and information. Are men and 
women essentially changed, however ? I sup- 
pose the Parson would say we have lost 
faith, for one thing. 

Mandeville. And superstition; and 
gained toleration. 

Herbert. The question is, whether toL 
eration is anything but indifference. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 189 

The Parson. Everything is tolerated 
now but Christian orthodoxy. 

The Fire-Tender. It 's easy enough to 
make a brilliant catalogue of external achieve- 
ments, but I take it that real progress ought 
to be in man himself. It is not a question 
of what a man enjoys, but what he can pro- 
duce. The best sculpture was executed two 
thousand years ago. The best paintings are 
several centuries old. We study the finest 
architecture in its ruins. The standards of 
poetry are Shakespeare, Homer, Isaiah, and 
David. The latest of the arts, music, cul- 
minated in composition, though not in exe- 
cution, a century ago. 

The Mistress. Yet culture in music 
certainly distinguishes the civilization of this 
age. It has taken eighteen hundred years 
for the principles of the Christian religion 
to begin to be practically incorporated in 
government and in ordinary business, and it 
will take a long time for Beethoven to be 
popularly recognized ; but there is growth 
toward him, and not away from him, and 
when the average culture has reached his 
height, some other genius will still more 
profoundly and delicately express the high- 
est thoughts. 



190 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

Herbert. I wish I could believe it. 
The spirit of this age is expressed by the 
Calliope. 

The Parson. Yes, it remained for us to 
add church-bells and cannon to the orches- 
tra. 

Our Next Door. It 's a melancholy 
thought to me that we can no longer ex- 
press ourselves with the bass-drum ; there 
used to be the whole of the Fourth of July 
in its patriotic throbs. 

Mandeville. We certainly have made 
great progress in one art, — that of war. 

The Young Lady. And in the humane 
alleviations of the miseries of war. 

The Fire-Tender. The most discour- 
aging symptom to me in our undoubted ad- 
vance in the comforts and refinements of so- 
ciety is the facility with which men slip back 
into barbarism, if the artificial and external 
accidents of their lives are changed. We 
have always kept a fringe of barbarism on 
our shifting western frontier ; and I think 
there never was a worse society than that in 
California and Xevada in their early days. 

The Young Lady. That is because wo- 
men were absent. 

The Fire-Tender. But women are not 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 191 

absent in London and New York, and they 
are conspicuous in the most exceptionable 
demonstrations of social anarchy. Certainly 
they were not wanting in Paris. Yes, there 
was a city widely accepted as the summit of 
our material civilization. No city was so 
beautiful, so luxurious, so safe, so well or- 
dered for the comfort of living ; and yet it 
needed only a month or two to make it a 
kind of Pandemonium of savagery. Its citi- 
zens were the barbarians who destroyed its 
own monuments of civilization. I don't mean 
to say that there was no apology for what was 
done there in the deceit and fraud that pre- 
ceded it, but I simply notice how ready the 
tiger was to appear, and how little restraint 
all the material civilization was to the beast. 

The Mistress. I can't deny your in- 
stances, and yet I somehow feel that pretty 
much all you have been saying is in effect 
untrue. Not one of you would be willing to 
change our civilization for any other. In 
your estimate you take no account, it seems 
to me, of the growth of charity. 

Mandeville. And you might add a rec- 
ognition of the value of human life. 

The Mistress. I don't believe there was 
ever before diffused everywhere such an ele- 



192 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

ment of good will, and never before were wo- 
men so much engaged in philanthropic work. 

The Parson. It must be confessed that 
one of the best signs of the times is woman's 
charity for woman. That certainly never 
existed to the same extent in any other civ- 
ilization. 

Mandeville. And there is another thing 
that distinguishes us, or is beginning to. 
That is, the notion that you can do some- 
thing more with a criminal than punish him ; 
and that society has not done its duty when 
it has built a sufficient number of schools 
for one class, or of decent jails for another. 

Herbert. It will be a long time before 
we get decent jails. 

Mandeville. But when we do they will 
begin to be places of education and train- 
ing as much as of punishment and disgrace. 
The public will provide teachers in the pris- 
ons as it now does in the common schools. 

The Fire-Tender. The imperfections of 
our methods and means of selecting those in 
the community who ought to be in prison are 
so great that extra care in dealing with them 
becomes us. We are beginning to learn that 
we cannot draw arbitrary lines with infallible 
justice. Perhaps half those who are convicted 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 193 

of crimes are as capable of reformation as 
half those transgressors who are not con- 
victed, or who keep inside the statutory law. 

Herbert. Would you remove the odium 
of prison ? 

The Fire -Tender. No; but I would 
have criminals believe, and society believe, 
that in going to prison a man or woman does 
not pass an absolute line and go into a fixed 
state. 

The Parson. That is, you would not 
have judgment and retribution begin in this 
world. 

Our Next Door. Don't switch us off 
into theology. I hate to go up in a balloon, 
or see any one else go. 

Herbert. Don't you think there is too 
much leniency toward crime and criminals, 
taking the place of justice, in these days ? 

The Fire -Tender. There may be too 
much disposition to condone the crimes of 
those who have been considered respectable. 

Our Next Door, That is, scarcely any- 
body wants to see his friend hung. 

Mandeville. I think a large part of the 
bitterness of the condemned arises from a 
sense of the inequality with which justice is 
administered. I am surprised, in visiting 



194 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

jails, to find so few respectable-looking con. 
victs. 

Our Next Door. Nobody will go to 
jail nowadays who thinks anything of him- 
self. 

The Fire-Tender. When society seri- 
ously takes hold of the reformation of crim- 
inals (say with as much determination as it 
does to carry an election) this false leniency 
will disappear ; for it partly springs from a 
feeling that punishment is unequal, and does 
not discriminate enough in individuals, and 
that society itself has no right to turn a man 
over to the Devil, simply because he shows 
a strong leaning that way. A part of the 
scheme of those who work for the reforma- 
tion of criminals is to render punishment 
more certain, and to let its extent depend 
upon reformation. There is no reason why 
a professional criminal, who won't change 
his trade for an honest one, should have in- 
tervals of freedom in his prison life in which 
he is let loose to prey upon society. Crim- 
inals ought to be discharged, like insane 
patients, when they are cured. 

Our Next Door. It 's a wonder to me, 
what with our multitudes of statutes and 
hosts of detectives, that we are any of us out 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 195 

of jail. I never come away from a visit to 
a state-prison without a new spasm of fear 
and virtue. The facilities for getting into 
jail seem to be ample. We want more or- 
ganizations for keeping people out. 

Mandeville. That is the sort of enter- 
prise the women are engaged in, the frustra- 
tion of the criminal tendencies of those born 
in vice. I believe women have it in their 
power to regenerate the world morally. 

The Parson. It's time they began to 
undo the mischief of their mother. 

The Mistress. The reason they have 
not made more progress is that they have 
usually confined their individual efforts to 
one man ; they are now organizing for a 
general campaign. 

The Fire-Tender. I 'm not sure but 
here is where the ameliorations of the condi- 
tions of life, which are called the comforts 
of this civilization, come in, after all, and 
distinguish the age above all others. They 
have enabled the finer powers of women to 
have play as they could not in a ruder age. 
I should like to live a hundred years and see 
what they will do. 

Herbert. Not much but change the 
fashions, unless they submit themselves to 



196 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the same training and discipline that men 
do. 

I have no doubt that Herbert had to apol- 
ogize for this remark afterwards in private, 
as men are quite willing to do in particular 
cases ; it is only in general they are unjust. 
The talk drifted off into general and partic- 
ular depreciation of other times. Mande- 
ville described a picture, in which he ap- 
peared to have confidence, of a fight between 
an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus, where 
these huge iron-clad brutes were represented 
chewing up different portions of each other's 
bodies in a forest of the lower cretaceous 
period. So far as he could learn, that sort 
of thing went on unchecked for hundreds of 
thousands of years, and was typical of the 
intercourse of the races of man till a com- 
paratively recent period. There was also 
that gigantic swan, the Plesiosaurus ; in fact, 
all the early brutes were disgusting. He 
delighted to think that even the lower ani- 
mals had improved, both in appearance and 
disposition. 

The conversation ended, therefore, in a 
very amicable manner, having been taken to 
a ground that nobody knew anything about. 



NINTH STUDY. 

I. 

Can you have a backlog in July ? That 
depends upon circumstances. 

In northern New England it is considered 
a sign of summer when the housewives fill 
the fireplaces with branches of mountain 
laurel, and, later, with the feathery stalks of 
the asparagus. This is often, too, the timid 
expression of a tender feeling, under Puri- 
tanic repression, which has not sufficient 
vent in the sweet-william and hollyhock at 
the front door. This is a yearning after 
beauty and ornamentation which has no 
other means of gratifying itself. 

In the most rigid circumstances, the grace- 
ful nature of woman thus discloses itself in 
these mute expressions of an undeveloped 
taste. You may never doubt what the com- 
mon flowers growing along the pathway to 
the front door mean to the maiden of many 
summers who tends them, — love and re- 
ligion, and the weariness of an uneventful 



198 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

life. The sacredness of the Sabbath, the 
hidden memory of an unrevealed and unre- 
quited affection, the slow years of gathering 
and wasting sweetness, are in the smell of 
the pink and the sweet-clover. These senti- 
mental plants breathe something of the long- 
ing of the maiden who sits in the Sunday 
evenings of summer on the lonesome front 
door-stone, singing the hymns of the saints, 
and perennial as the myrtle that grows 
thereby. 

Yet not always in summer, even with the 
aid of unrequited love and devotional feel- 
ing, is it safe to let the fire go out on the 
hearth, in our latitude. I remember when 
the last almost total eclipse of the sun hap- 
pened in August, what a bone-piercing chill 
came over the world. Perhaps the imagina- 
tion had something to do with causing the 
chill from that temporary hiding of the sun 
to feel so much more penetrating than that 
from the coming on of night, which shortly \ 
followed. It was impossible not to experi- 
ence a shudder as of the approach of the 
Judgment Day, when the shadows were flung 
upon the green lawn, and we all stood in the 
wan light, looking unfamiliar to each other. 
The birds in the trees felt the spell. We 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 199 

could in fancy see those spectral camp-fires 
which men would build on the earth, if the 
sun should slow its fires down to about the 
brilliancy of the moon. It was a great re- 
lief to all of us to go into the house, and, 
before a blazing wood fire, talk of the end 
of the world. 

In New England it is scarcely ever safe 
to let the fire go out ; it is best to bank it, 
for it needs but the turn of a weather-vane 
at any hour to sweep the Atlantic rains over 
us, or to bring down the chill of Hudson's 
Bay. There are days when the steamship 
on the Atlantic glides calmly along under a 
full canvas, but its central fires must always 
be ready to make steam against head-winds 
and antagonistic waves. Even in our most 
smiling summer days one needs to have the 
materials of a cheerful fire at hand. It is 
only by this readiness for a change that one 
can preserve an equal mind. We are made 
provident and sagacious by the fickleness of 
our climate. We should be another sort of 
people if we could have that serene, un- 
clouded trust in nature which the Egyptian 
has. The gravity and repose of the Eastern 
peoples is due to the unchanging aspect of 
the sky, and the deliberation and regularity 



200 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

of the great climatic processes. Our litera- 
ture, politics, religion, show the effect of un- 
settled weather. But they compare favora- 
bly with the Egyptian, for all that. 



II. 

You cannot know, the Young Lady wrote, 
with what longing I look back to those win- 
ter days by the fire ; though all the windows 
are open to this May morning, and the brown 
thrush is singing in the chestnut-tree, and 
I see everywhere that first delicate flush of 
spring, which seems too evanescent to be 
color even, and amounts to little more than 
a suffusion of the atmosphere. I doubt, in- 
deed, if the spring is exactly what it used to 
be, or if, as we get on in years [no one ever 
speaks of " getting on in years " till she is 
virtually settled in life], its promises and 
suggestions do not seem empty in compari- 
son with the sympathies and responses of 
human friendship, and the stimulation of 
society. Sometimes nothing is so tiresome 
as a perfect day in a perfect season. 

I only imperfectly understand this. The 
Parson says that woman is always most rest- 
less under the most favorable conditions, and 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 201 

that there is no state in which she is really- 
happy except that of change. I suppose this 
is the truth taught in what has been called 
the "Myth of the Garden." Woman is 
perpetual revolution, and is that element in 
the world which continually destroys and 
recreates. She is the experimenter and the 
suggester of new combinations. She has no 
belief in any law of eternal fitness of things. 
She is never even content with any arrange- 
ment of her own house. The only reason 
the Mistress could give, when she rearranged 
her apartment, for hanging a picture in what 
seemed the most inappropriate place, was 
that it had never been there before. Woman 
has no respect for tradition, and because a 
thing is as it is is sufficient reason for chang- 
ing it. When she gets into law, as she has 
come into literature, we shall gain something 
in the destruction of all our vast and musty 
libraries of precedents, which now fetter our 
administration of individual justice. It is 
Mandeville's opinion that women are not so 
sentimental as men, and are not so easily 
touched with the unspoken poetry of nature ; 
being less poetical, and having less imagina- 
tion, they are more fitted for practical af- 
fairs, and would make less failures in busi- 



202 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

ness. I have noticed the almost selfish 
passion for their flowers which old garden- 
ers have, and their reluctance to part with a 
leaf or a blossom from their family. They 
love the flowers for themselves. A woman 
raises flowers for their use. She is destruc- 
tion in a conservatory. She wants the flow- 
ers for her lover, for the sick, for the poor, 
for the Lord on Easter day, for the orna- 
mentation of her house. She delights in the 
costly pleasure of sacrificing them. She 
never sees a flower but she has an intense 
but probably sinless desire to pick it. 

It has been so from the first, though from 
the first she has been thwarted by the ac- 
cidental superior strength of man. What- 
ever she has obtained has been by craft, and 
by the same coaxing which the sun uses to 
draw the blossoms out of the apple-trees. I 
am not surprised to learn that she has be- 
come tired of indulgences, and wants some 
of the original rights. We are just begin- 
ning to find out the extent to which she has 
been denied and subjected, and especially 
her condition among the primitive and bar- 
barous races. I have never seen it in a 
platform of grievances, but it is true that 
among the Fijians she is not, unless a better 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 203 

civilization has wrought a change in her be- 
half, permitted to eat people, even her own 
sex, at the feasts of the men ; the dainty en- 
joyed by the men being considered too good 
to be wasted on women. Is anything want- 
ing to this picture of the degradation of 
woman ? By a refinement of cruelty she re- 
ceives no benefit whatever from the mission- 
aries who are sent out by — what to her 
must seem a new name for Tan-talus — the 
American Board. 

I suppose the Young Lady expressed a 
nearly universal feeling in her regret at the 
breaking up of the winter-fireside company. 
Society needs a certain seclusion and the 
sense of security. Spring opens the doors 
and the windows, and the noise and unrest 
of the world are let in. Even a winter thaw 
begets a desire to travel, and summer brings 
longings innumerable, and disturbs the most 
tranquil souls. Nature is, in fact, a sug- 
gester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrim- 
ages and of excursions of the fancy which 
never come to any satisfactory haven. The 
summer in these latitudes is a campaign of 
sentiment and a season, for the most part, of 
restlessness and discontent. We grow now 
in hot-houses roses which, in form and color, 



204 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

are magnificent, and appear to be full of 
passion; yet one simple June rose of the 
open air has for the Young Lady, I doubt 
not, more sentiment and suggestion of love 
than a conservatory full of them in Janu- 
ary. And this suggestion, leavened as it is 
with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated 
by the promises which are so often like the 
peach-bloom of the Judas-tree, unsatisfying 
by reason of its vague possibilities, differs 
so essentially from the more limited and 
attainable and home-like emotion born of 
quiet intercourse by the winter fireside, that 
I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if 
some spell had been broken by the transition 
of her life from in-doors to out-doors. Her 
secret, if secret she has, which I do not at 
all know, is shared by the birds and the new 
leaves and the blossoms on the fruit trees. 
If we lived elsewhere, in that zone where the 
poets pretend always to dwell, we might be 
content, perhaps I should say drugged, by 
the sweet influences of an unchanging sum- 
mer; but not living elsewhere, we can un- 
derstand why the Young Lady probably now 
looks forward to the hearthstone as the most 
assured centre of enduring attachment. 
If it should ever become the sad duty of 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 205 

this biographer to write of disappointed love, 
I am sure he would not have any sensational 
story to tell of the Young Lady. She is one 
of those women whose unostentatious lives 
are the chief blessing of humanity; who, 
with a sigh heard only by herself and no 
change in her sunny face, would put behind 
her all the memories of winter evenings and 
the promises of May mornings, and give her 
life to some ministration of human kindness 
with an assiduity that would make her oc- 
cupation appear like an election and a first 
choice. The disappointed man scowls, and 
hates his race, and threatens self-destruction, 
choosing oftener the flowing bowl than the 
dagger, and becoming a reeling nuisance in 
the world. It would be much more manly 
in him to become the secretary of a Dorcas 
society. 

I suppose it is true that women work for 
others with less expectation of reward than 
men, and give themselves to labors of self- 
sacrifice with much less thought of self. At 
least, this is true unless woman goes into 
some public performance, where notoriety 
has its attractions, and mounts some cause, 
to ride it man-fashion, when I think she be- 
comes just as eager for applause and just as 



206 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

willing that self-sacrifice should result in self- 
elevation as man. For her, usually, are not 
those unbought " presentations " which are 
forced upon firemen, philanthropists, legis- 
lators, railroad-men, and the superintendents 
of the moral instruction of the young. These 
are almost always pleasing and unexpected 
tributes to worth and modesty, and must be 
received with satisfaction when the public 
service rendered has not been with a view to 
procuring them. We should say that one 
ought to be most liable to receive a " testi- 
monial " who, being a superintendent of any 
sort, did not superintend with a view to 
getting it. But " testimonials " have become 
so common that a modest man ought really 
to be afraid to do his simple duty, for fear 
his motives will be misconstrued. Yet there 
are instances of very worthy men who have 
had things publicly presented to them. It 
is the blessed age of gifts and the reward of 
private virtue. And the presentations have 
become so frequent that we wish there were 
a little more variety in them. There never 
was much sense in giving a gallant fellow a 
big speaking-trumpet to carry home to aid 
him in his intercourse with his family ; and 
the festive ice-pitcher has become a too uni- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 207 

versal sign of absolute devotion to the public 
interest. The lack of one will soon be proof 
that a man is a knave. The legislative cane 
with the gold head, also, is getting to be 
recognized as the sign of the immaculate 
public servant, as the inscription on it testi- 
fies, and the steps of suspicion must erelong 
dog him who does not carry one. The " tes- 
timonial " business is, in truth, a little de- 
moralizing, almost as much so as the " dona- 
tion ; " and the demoralization has extended 
even to our language, so that a perfectly re- 
spectable man is often obliged to see himself 
" made the recipient of " this and that. It 
would be much better, if testimonials must 
be, to give a man a barrel of flour or a keg 
of oysters, and let him eat himself at once 
back into the ranks of ordinary men. 

III. 

We may have a testimonial class in time, 
a sort of nobility here in America, made so by 
popular gift, the members of which will all 
be able to show some stick, or piece of plated 
ware, or massive chain, " of which they have 
been the recipients." In time it may be a 
distinction not to belong to it, and it may 



208 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

come to be thought more blessed to give 
than to receive. For it must have been re- 
marked that it is not always to the cleverest 
and the most amiable and modest man that 
the deputation comes with the inevitable ice- 
pitcher (and " salver to match "), which has 
in it the magic and subtle quality of making 
the hour in which it is received the proudest 
of one's life. There has not been discovered 
any method of rewarding all the deserving 
people and bringing their virtues into the 
prominence of notoriety. And, indeed, it 
would be an unreasonable world if there 
had, for its chief charm and sweetness lie in 
the excellences in it which are reluctantly 
disclosed ; one of the chief pleasures of liv- 
ing is in the daily discovery of good traits, 
nobilities, and kindliness both in those we 
have long known and in the chance pas- 
senger whose way happens for a day to lie 
with ours. The longer I live the more I am 
impressed with the excess of human kind- 
ness over human hatred, and the greater 
willingness to oblige than to disoblige that 
one meets at every turn. The selfishness in 
politics, the jealousy in letters, the bickering 
in art, the bitterness in theology, are all as 
nothing compared to the sweet charities, 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 209 

sacrifices, and deferences of private life. 
The people are few whom to know inti- 
mately is to dislike. Of course you want to 
hate somebody, if you can, just to keep your 
powers of discrimination bright, and to save 
yourself from becoming a mere mush of 
good-nature ; but perhaps it is well to hate 
some historical person who has been dead so 
long as to be indifferent to it. It is more 
comfortable to hate people we have never 
seen. I cannot but think that Judas Iscariot 
has been of great service to the world as a 
sort of buffer for moral indignation which 
might have made a collision nearer home 
but for his utilized treachery. I used to 
know a venerable and most amiable gentle- 
man and scholar, whose hospitable house 
was always overrun with wayside ministers, 
agents, and philanthropists, who lo^ed their 
fellow-men better than they loved to work 
for their living ; and he, I suspect, kept his 
moral balance even by indulgence in violent 
but most distant dislikes. When I met him 
casually in the street, his first salutation was 
likely to be such as this : " What a liar that 
Alison was ! Don't you hate him ? " And 
then would follow specifications of historical 
inveracity enough to make one's blood run 



210 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

cold. When he was thus discharged of his 
hatred by such a conductor, I presume he 
had not a spark left for those whose mission 
was partly to live upon him and other gener- 
ous souls. 

Mandeville and I were talking of the un- 
known people, one rainy night by the fire, 
while the Mistress was fitfully and interjec- 
tionally playing with the piano-keys in an 
improvising mood. Mandeville has a good 
deal of sentiment about him, and without 
any effort talks so beautifully sometimes 
that I constantly regret I cannot report his 
language. He has, besides, that sympathy 
of presence — I believe it is called magnet- 
ism by those who regard the brain as only a 
sort of galvanic battery — which makes it a 
greater pleasure to see him think, if I may 
say so, than to hear some people talk. 

It makes one homesick in this world to 
think that there are so many rare people he 
can never know ; and so many excellent 
people that scarcely any one will know, in 
fact. One discovers a friend by chance, and 
cannot but feel regret that twenty or thirty 
years of life, may be, have been spent with- 
out the least knowledge of him. When he 
is once known, through him opening is made 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 211 

into another little world, into a circle of cul- 
ture and loving hearts and enthusiasm in a 
dozen congenial pursuits, and prejudices per- 
haps. How instantly and easily the bachelor 
doubles his world when he marries, and en- 
ters into the unknown fellowship of the to 
him continually increasing company which 
is known in popular language as " all his 
wife's relations." 

Near at hand daily, no doubt, are those 
worth knowing intimately, if one had the 
time and the opportunity. And when one 
travels he sees what a vast material there is 
for society and friendship, of which he can 
never avail himself. Car-load after car-load 
of summer travel goes by one at any rail- 
way-station, out of which he is sure he could 
choose a score of life-long friends, if the con- 
ductor would introduce him. There are faces 
of refinement, of quick wit, of sympathetic 
kindness, — interesting people, travelled peo- 
ple, entertaining people, — as you would say 
in Boston, "nice people you would admire 
to know," whom you constantly meet and 
pass without a sign of recognition, many of 
whom are no doubt your long-lost brothers 
and sisters. You can see that they also 
have their worlds and their interests, and 



212 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

they probably know a great many " nice " 
people. The matter of personal liking and 
attachment is a good deal due to the mere 
fortune of association. More fast friend- 
ships and pleasant acquaintanceships are 
formed on the Atlantic steamships, between 
those who would have been only indiffer- 
ent acquaintances elsewhere, than one would 
think possible on a voyage which naturally 
makes one as selfish as he is indifferent to 
his personal appearance. The Atlantic is 
the only power on earth I know that can 
make a woman indifferent to her personal 
appearance. 

Mandeville remembers, and I think with- 
out detriment to himself, the glimpses he 
had in the White Mountains once of a young 
lady of whom his utmost efforts could only 
give him no further information than her 
name. Chance sight of her on a passing 
stage or amid a group on some mountain 
lookout was all he ever had, and he did not 
even know certainly whether she was the 
perfect beauty and the lovely character he 
thought her. He said he would have known 
her, however, at a great distance ; there was 
in her form that ravishing mingling of grace 
and command of which we hear so much, 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 213 

and which turns out to be nearly all com- 
mand after the " ceremony ; " or perhaps it 
was something in the glance of her eye or 
the turn of her head, or very likely it was a 
sweet inherited reserve or hauteur, that cap- 
tivated him, that filled his days with the ex- 
pectation of seeing her, and made him hasten 
to the hotel registers in the hope that her 
name was there recorded. Whatever it was, 
she interested him as one of the people he 
would like to know ; and it piqued him that 
there was a life, rich in friendships, no 
doubt, in tastes, in many noblenesses, — one 
of thousands of such, — that must be abso- 
lutely nothing to him, — nothing but a win- 
dow into heaven momentarily opened and 
then closed. I have myself no idea that she 
was a countess incognito, or that she had 
descended from any greater heights than 
those where Mandeville saw her, but I have 
always regretted that she went her way so 
mysteriously and left no clew, and that we 
shall wear out the remainder of our days 
without her society. I have looked for her 
name, but always in vain, among the attend- 
ants at the rights' conventions, in the list of 
those good Americans presented at court, 
among those skeleton names that appear as 



214 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the remains of beauty in the morning jour- 
nals after a ball to the wandering prince, in 
the reports of railway collisions and steam- 
boat explosions. No news comes of her. 
And so imperfect are our means of commu- 
nication in this world that, for anything we 
know, she may have left it long ago by some 
private way. 

IV. 

The lasting regret that we cannot know 
more of the bright, sincere, and genuine 
people of the world is increased by the fact 
that they are all different from each other. 
Was it not Madame de Sevigne* who said 
she had loved several different women for 
several different qualities ? Every real per- 
son — for there are persons, as there are 
fruits, that have no distinguishing flavor, 
mere gooseberries — has a distinct quality, 
and the finding it is always like the dis- 
covery of a new island to the voyager. 
The physical world we shall exhaust some 
day, having a written description of every 
foot of it to which we can turn ; but we 
shall never get the different qualities of 
people into a biographical dictionary, and 
the making acquaintance with a human be- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 215 

ing will never cease to be an exciting experi- 
ment. We cannot even classify men so as 
to aid us much in our estimate of them. The 
efforts in this direction are ingenious, but 
unsatisfactory. If I hear that a man is 
lymphatic or nervous-sanguine, I cannot tell 
therefrom whether I shall like and trust him. 
He may produce a phrenological chart show- 
ing that his knobby head is the home of all 
the virtues, and that the vicious tendencies 
are represented by holes in his cranium, and 
yet I cannot be sure that he will not be as 
disagreeable as if phrenology had not been 
invented. I feel sometimes that phrenology 
is the refuge of mediocrity. Its charts are 
almost as misleading concerning character 
as photographs. And photography may be 
described as the art which enables common- 
place mediocrity to look like genius. The 
heavy-jo wled man with shallow cerebrum 
has only to incline his head so that the lying 
instrument can select a favorable focus, to 
appear in the picture with the brow of a 
sage and the chin of a poet. Of all the arts 
for ministering to human vanity the photo- 
graphic is the most useful, but it is a poor 
aid in the revelation of character. You shall 
learn more of a man's real nature by seeing 



216 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

him walk once up the broad aisle of his 
church to his pew on Sunday than by study- 
ing his photograph for a month. 

No, we do not get any certain standard of 
men by a chart of their temperaments ; it 
will hardly answer to select a wife by the 
color of her hair ; though it be by nature as 
red as a cardinal's hat, she may be no more 
constant than if it were dyed. The farmer 
who shuns all the lymphatic beauties in his 
neighborhood, and selects to wife the most 
nervous-sanguine, may find that she is un- 
willing to get up in the winter mornings and 
make the kitchen fire. Many a man, even 
in this scientific age which professes to label 
us all, has been cruelly deceived in this way. 
Neither the blondes nor the brunettes act ac- 
cording to the advertisement of their temper- 
aments. The truth is that men refuse to 
come under the classifications of the pseudo- 
scientists, and all our new nomenclatures do 
not add much to our knowledge. You know 
what to expect — if the comparison will be 
pardoned — of a horse with certain points ; 
but you would n't dare go on a journey with 
a man merely upon the strength of knowing 
that his temperament was the proper mixture 
of the sanguine and the phlegmatic. Science 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 2YI 

is not able to teach us concerning men as it 
teaches us of horses, though I am very far 
from saying that there are not traits of no- 
bleness and of meanness that run through fam- 
ilies and can be calculated to appear in indi- 
viduals with absolute certainty ; one family 
will be trusty and another tricky through all 
its members for generations ; noble strains 
and ignoble strains are perpetuated. When 
we hear that she has eloped with the stable- 
boy and married him, we are apt to remark, 
" Well, she was a Bogardus." And when 
we read that she has gone on a mission and 
has died, distinguishing herself by some ex- 
traordinary devotion to the heathen at XJjiji, 
we think it sufficient to say, " Yes, her mother 
married into the Smiths." But this knowl- 
edge comes of our experience of special fam- 
ilies, and stands us in stead no further. 

If we cannot classify men scientifically and 
reduce them under a kind of botanical order, 
as if they had a calculable vegetable develop- 
ment, neither can we gain much knowledge 
of them by comparison. It does not help me 
at all in my estimate of their characters to 
compare Mandeville with the Young Lady, 
or Our Next Door with the Parson. The 
wise man does not permit himself to set up, 



218 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

even in his own mind, any comparison of his 
friends. His friendship is capable of going 
to extremes with many people, evoked as it 
is by many qualities. When Mandeville goes 
into my garden in June I can usually find 
him in a particular bed of strawberries, but 
he does not speak disrespectfully of the 
others. When Nature, says Mandeville, con- 
sents to put herself into any sort of straw- 
berry, I have no criticisms to make ; I am 
only glad that I have been created into the 
same world with such a delicious manifesta- 
tion of the Divine favor. If I left Mande- 
ville alone in the garden long enough, I have 
no doubt he would impartially make an end 
of the fruit of all the beds, for his capacity 
in this direction is as all-embracing as it is 
in the matter of friendships. The Young 
Lady has also her favorite patch of berries. 
And the Parson, I am sorry to say, prefers 
to have them picked for him — the elect of 
the garden — and served in an orthodox 
manner. The strawberry has a sort of poet- 
ical precedence, and I presume that no fruit 
is jealous of it any more than any flower is 
jealous of the rose ; but I remark the facil- 
ity with which liking for it is transferred to 
the raspberry, and from the raspberry (not 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 219 

to make a tedious enumeration) to the melon, 
and from the melon to the grape, and the 
grape to the pear, and the pear to the apple. 
And we do not mar our enjoyment of each 
by comparisons. 

Of course it would be a dull world if we 
could not criticise our friends, but the most 
unprofitable and unsatisfactory criticism is 
that by comparison. Criticism is not neces- 
sarily uncharitableness, but a wholesome ex- 
ercise of our powers of analysis and discrimi- 
nation. It is, however, a very idle exercise, 
leading to no results when we set the qual- 
ities of one over against the qualities of 
another, and disparage by contrast, and not 
by independent judgment. And this method 
of procedure creates jealousies and heart- 
burnings innumerable. 

Criticism by comparison is the refuge of 
incapables, and especially is this true in lit- 
erature. It is a lazy way of disposing of a 
young poet to bluntly declare, without any 
sort of discrimination of his defects or his 
excellences, that he equals Tennyson, and 
that Scott never wrote anything finer. What 
is the justice of damning a meritorious nov- 
elist by comparing him with Dickens, and 
smothering him with thoughtless and good- 



220 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

natured eulogy ? The poet and the novelist 
may be well enough, and probably have 
qualities and gifts of their own which are 
worth the critic's attention, if he has any 
time to bestow on them ; and it is certainly 
unjust to subject them to a comparison with 
somebody else, merely because the critic will 
not take the trouble to ascertain what they 
are. If, indeed, the poet and novelist are 
mere imitators of a model and copyists of a 
style, they may be dismissed with such com- 
mendation as we bestow upon the machines 
who pass their lives in making bad copies of 
the pictures of the great painters. But the 
critics of whom we speak do not intend de- 
preciation, but eulogy, when they say that 
the author they have in hand has the wit of 
Sydney Smith and the brilliancy of Ma- 
caulay. Probably he is not like either of 
them, and may have a genuine though mod- 
est virtue of his own ; but these names will 
certainly kill him, and he will never be any- 
body in the popular estimation. The pub- 
lic finds out speedily that he is not Sydney 
Smith, and it resents the extravagant claim 
for him as if he were an impudent pretender. 
How many authors of fair ability to interest 
the world have we known in our own day 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 221 

who have been thus sky-rocketed into noto- 
riety by the lazy indiscrimination of the 
critic-by-comparison, and then have sunk 
into a popular contempt as undeserved ! I 
never see a young aspirant injudiciously 
compared to a great and resplendent name 
in literature but I feel like saying, My poor 
fellow, your days are few and full of trouble ; 
you begin life handicapped, and you cannot 
possibly run a creditable race. 

I think this sort of critical eulogy is more 
damaging even than that which kills by a dif- 
ferent assumption, and one which is equally 
common, namely, that the author has not 
done what he probably never intended to do. 
It is well known that most of the trouble in 
life comes from our inability to compel other 
people to do what we think they ought, and 
it is true in criticism that we are unwilling 
to take a book for what it is, and credit the 
author with that. When the solemn critic, 
like a mastiff with a lady's bonnet in his 
mouth, gets hold of a light piece of verse, or 
a graceful sketch which catches the humor 
of an hour for the entertainment of an hour, 
he tears it into a thousand shreds. It adds 
nothing to human knowledge, it solves none 
of the problems of life, it touches none of 



222 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the questions of social science, it is not a 
philosophical treatise, and it is not a dozen 
things that it might have been. The critic 
cannot forgive the author for this disrespect 
to him. This isn't a rose, says the critic, 
taking up a pansy and rending it ; it is not 
at all like a rose, and the author is either 
a pretentious idiot or an idiotic pretender. 
What business, indeed, has the author to 
send the critic a bunch of sweet-peas, when 
he knows that a cabbage would be preferred, 
— something not showy, but useful? 

A good deal of this is what Mandeville 
said, and I am not sure that it is devoid of 
personal feeling. He published, some years 
ago, a little volume giving an account of a 
trip through the Great West, and a very en- 
tertaining book it was. But one of the 
heavy critics got hold of it, and made Man- 
deville appear, even to himself, he confessed, 
like an ass, because there was nothing in the 
volume about geology or mining prospects, 
and very little to instruct the student of 
physical geography. With alternate sar- 
casm and ridicule, he literally basted the 
author, till Mandeville said that he felt al- 
most like a depraved scoundrel, and thought 
he should be held up to less execration 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 228 

if he had committed a neat and scientific 
murder. 

But I confess that I have a good deal of 
sympathy with the critics. Consider what 
these public tasters have to endure ! None 
of us, I fancy, would like to be compelled 
to read all that they read, or to take into 
our mouths, even with the privilege of speed- 
ily ejecting it with a grimace, all that they 
sip. The critics of the vintage, who pursue 
their calling in the dark vaults and amid 
mouldy casks, give their opinion, for the 
most part, only upon wine, upon juice that 
has matured and ripened into the develop- 
ment of quality. But what crude, unstrained, 
unfermented, even raw and drugged liquor, 
must the literary taster put to his unwilling 
lips day after day ! 



TENTH STUDY. 

I. 

It was my good fortune once to visit a 
man who remembered* the rebellion of 1745. 
Lest this confession should make me seem 
very aged, I will add that the visit took 
place in 1851, and that the man was then 
one hundred and thirteen years old. He 
was quite a lad before Dr. Johnson drank 
Mrs. Thrale's tea. That he was as old as 
he had the credit of being I have the evi- 
dence of my own senses (and I am seldom 
mistaken in a person's age), of his own fam- 
ily, and his own word ; and it is incredible 
that so old a person, and one so apparently 
near the grave, would deceive about his age. 

The testimony of the very aged is always 
to be received without question, as Alexan- 
der Hamilton once learned. He was trying 
a land-title with Aaron Burr, and two of the 
witnesses upon whom Burr relied were ven- 
erable Dutchmen, who had, in their youth, 
carried the surveying chains over the land 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 225 

in dispute, and who were now aged respec- 
tively one hundred and four years and one 
hundred and six years. Hamilton gently 
attempted to undervalue their testimony, but 
he was instantly put down by the Dutch jus- 
tice, who suggested that Mr. Hamilton could 
not be aware of the age of the witnesses. 

My old man (the expression seems famil- 
iar and inelegant) had indeed an exagger- 
ated idea of his own age, and sometimes said 
that he supposed he was going on four hun- 
dred, which was true enough, in fact ; but 
for the exact date, he referred to his young- 
est son, — a frisky and humorsome lad of 
eighty years, who had received us at the 
gate, and whom we had at first mistaken for 
the veteran, his father. But when we be- 
held the old man, we saw the difference be- 
tween age and age. The latter had settled 
into a grizzliness and grimness which belong 
to a very aged and stunted but sturdy oak- 
tree, upon the bark of which the gray moss 
is thick and heavy. The old man appeared 
hale enough, he could walk about, his sight 
and hearing were not seriously impaired, he 
ate with relish, and his teeth were so sound 
that he would not need a dentist for at least 
another century ; but the moss was growing 



226 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

on him. His boy of eighty seemed a green 
sapling beside him. 

He remembered absolutely nothing that 
had taken place within thirty years, but 
otherwise his mind was perhaps as good as 
it ever was, for he must always have been 
an ignoramus, and would never know any- 
thing if he lived to be as old as he said he 
was going on to be. Why he was interested 
in the rebellion of 1745 I could not discover, 
for he of course did not go over to Scotland 
to carry a pike in it, and he only remem- 
bered to have heard it talked about as a 
great event in the Irish market-town near 
which he lived, and to which he had ridden 
when a boy. And he knew much more 
about the horse that drew him, and the cart 
in which he rode, than he did about the re- 
bellion of the Pretender. 

I hope I do not appear to speak harshly 
of this amiable old man, and if he is still 
living I wish him well, although his example 
was bad in some respects. He had used to- 
bacco for nearly a century, and the habit 
has very likely been the death of him. If 
so, it is to be regretted. For it would have 
been interesting to watch the process of his 
gradual disintegration and return to the 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 227 

ground ; the loss of sense after sense, as 
decaying limbs fall from the oak ; the fail- 
ure of discrimination, of the power of choice, 
and finally of memory itself; the peaceful 
wearing out and passing away of body and 
mind without disease ; the natural running 
down of a man. The interesting fact about 
him at that time was that his bodily powers 
seemed in sufficient vigor, but that the mind 
had not force enough to manifest itself 
through his organs. The complete battery 
was there, the appetite was there, the acid 
was eating the zinc ; but the electric current 
was too weak to flash from the brain. And 
yet he appeared so sound throughout that it 
was difficult to say that his mind was not as 
good as it ever had been. He had stored in 
it very little to feed on, and any mind would 
get enfeebled by a century's rumination on 
a hearsay idea of the rebellion of '45. 

It was possible with this man to fully test 
one's respect for age, which is in all civilized 
nations a duty. And I found that my feel- 
ings were mixed about him. I discovered 
in him a conceit in regard to his long sojourn 
on this earth, as if it were somehow a credit 
to him. In the presence of his good opinion 
of himself, I could but question the real 



228 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

value of his continued life, to himself or to 
others. If he ever had any friends he had 
outlived them, except his boy; his wives — 
a century of them — were all dead ; the 
world had actually passed away for him. 
He hung on the tree like a frost-nipped 
apple, which the farmer has neglected to 
gather. The world always renews itself, 
and remains young. What relation had he 
to it? 

I was delighted to find that this old man 
had never voted for George Washington. I 
do not know that he had ever heard of him. 
Washington may be said to have played his 
part since his time. I am not sure that he 
perfectly remembered anything so recent as 
the American Revolution. He was living 
quietly in Ireland during our French and 
Indian wars, and he did not emigrate to this 
country till long after our revolutionary and 
our constitutional struggles were over. The 
rebellion of '45 was the great event of the 
world for him, and of that he knew nothing. 

I intend no disrespect to this man, — a 
cheerful and pleasant enough old person, — 
but he had evidently lived himself out of the 
world, as completely as people usually die 
out of it. His only remaining value was to 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 229 

the moralist, who might perchance make 
something out of him. I suppose if he, had 
died young, he would have been regretted, 
and his friends would have lamented that he 
did not fill out his days in the world, and 
would very likely have called him back, if 
tears and prayers could have done so. They 
can see now what his prolonged life amounted 
to, and how the world has closed up the gap 
he once filled while he still lives in it. 

A great part of the unhappiness of this 
world consists in regret for those who de- 
part, as it seems to us, prematurely. We 
imagine that if they would return, the old 
conditions would be restored. But would it 
be so ? If they, in any case, came back, 
would there be any place for them? The 
world so quickly readjusts itself after any 
loss that the return of the departed would 
nearly always throw it, even the circle most 
interested, into confusion. Are the Enoch 
Ardens ever wanted ? 



II. 

A popular notion akin to this, that the 
world would have any room for the departed 
if they should now and then return, is the 



230 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

constant regret that people will not learn by 
the experience of others that one genera- 
tion learns little from the preceding, and that 
youth never will adopt the experience of age. 
But if experience went for anything, we 
should all come to a standstill ; for there is 
nothing so discouraging to effort. Disbelief 
in Ecclesiastes is the mainspring of action. 
In that lies the freshness and the interest of 
life, and it is the source of every endeavor. 

If the boy believed that the accumulation 
of wealth and the acquisition of power were 
what the old man says they are, the world 
would very soon be stagnant. If he believed 
that his chances of obtaining either were as 
poor as the majority of men find them to be, 
ambition would die within him. It is be- 
cause he rejects the experience of those who 
have preceded him that the world is kept in 
the topsy-turvy condition which we all rejoice 
in, and which we call progress. 

And yet I confess I have a soft place in 
my heart for that rare character in our New 
England life who is content with the world 
as he finds it, and who does not attempt to 
appropriate any more of it to himself than 
he absolutely needs from day to day. He 
knows from the beginning that the world 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 231 

could get on without him, and he has never 
had any anxiety to leave any result behind 
him, any legacy for the world to quarrel 
over. 

He is really an exotic in our New England 
climate and society, and his life is perpetu- 
ally misunderstood by his neighbors, because 
he shares none of their uneasiness about get- 
ting on in life. He is even called lazy, good- 
for - nothing, and " shiftless," — the final 
stigma that we put upon a person who has 
learned to wait without the exhausting pro- 
cess of laboring. 

I made his acquaintance last summer in 
the country, and I have not in a long time 
been so well pleased with any of our species. 
He was a man past middle life, with a large 
family. He had always been from boyhood 
of a contented and placid mind, slow in his 
movements, slow in his speech. I think he 
never cherished a hard feeling toward any- 
body, nor envied any one, least of all the 
rich and prosperous about whom he liked to 
talk. Indeed, his talk was a good deal about 
wealth, especially about his cousin who had 
been down South and "got fore-handed" 
within a few years. He was genuinely 
pleased at his relation's good luck, and 



232 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

pointed him out to me with some pride. 
But he had no envy of him, and he evinced 
no desire to imitate him. I inferred from 
all his conversation about " piling it up " 
(of which he spoke with a gleam of enthu- 
siasm in his eye) that there were moments 
when he would like to be rich himself ; but 
it was evident that he would never make the 
least effort to be so, and I doubt if he could 
even overcome that delicious inertia of mind 
and body called laziness sufficiently to in- 
herit. 

Wealth seemed to have a far and peculiar 
fascination for him, and I suspect he was a 
visionary in the midst of his poverty. Yet 
I suppose he had hardly the personal prop- 
erty which the law exempts from execution. 
He had lived in a great many towns, moving 
from one to another with his growing family, 
by easy stages, and was always the poorest 
man in the town, and lived on the most nig- 
gardly of its rocky and bramble-grown farms, 
the productiveness of which he reduced to 
zero in a couple of seasons by his careful 
neglect of culture. The fences of his hired 
domain always fell into ruins under him, per- 
haps because he sat on them so much, and 
the hovels he occupied rotted down during 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 233 

his placid residence in them. lie moved 
from desolation to desolation, but carried 
always with him the equal mind of a philos- 
opher. Not even the occasional tart remarks 
of his wife, about their nomadic life and his 
serenity in the midst of discomfort, could 
ruffle his smooth spirit. 

He was, in every respect, a most worthy 
man, truthful, honest, temperate, and, I need 
not say, frugal ; and he had no bad habits, 
— perhaps he never had energy enough to 
acquire any. Nor did he lack the knack of 
the Yankee race. He could make a shoe, or 
build a house, or doctor a cow; but it never 
seemed to him, in this brief existence, worth 
while to do any of these things. He was 
an excellent angler, but he rarely fished ; 
partly because of the shortness of days, 
partly on account of the uncertainty of bites, 
but principally because the trout brooks 
were all arranged lengthwise and ran over 
so much ground. But no man liked to look 
at a string of trout better than he did, and 
he was willing to sit down in a sunny place 
and talk about trout-fishing half a day at a 
time, and he would talk pleasantly and well 
too, though his wife might be continually 
interrupting him by a call for firewood. 



234 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

I should not do justice to his own idea of 
himself if I did not add that he was most 
respectably connected, and that he had a 
justifiable though feeble pride in his family. 
It helped his self-respect, which no ignoble 
circumstances could destroy. He was, as 
must appear by this time, a most intelligent 
man, and he was a well-informed man ; that 
is to say, he read the weekly newspapers 
when he could get them, and he had the 
average country information about Beecher 
and Greeley and the Prussian war (" Napo- 
leon is gettin' on 't, ain't he ? ") and the 
general prospect of the election campaigns. 
Indeed, he was warmly, or rather luke- 
warmly, interested in politics. He liked to 
talk about the inflated currency, and it 
seemed plain to him that his condition would 
somehow be improved if we could get to a 
specie basis. He was, in fact, a little troub- 
led by the national debt ; it seemed to press 
on him somehow, while his own never did. 
He exhibited more animation over the affairs 
of the government than he did over his own, 
— an evidence at once of his disinterested- 
ness and his patriotism. He had been an 
old abolitionist, and was strong on the rights 
of free labor, though he did not care to ex- 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 235 

ercise his privilege much. Of course, he had 
the proper contempt for the poor whites 
down South. I never saw a person with 
more correct notions on such a variety of 
subjects. He was perfectly willing that 
churches (being himself a member) and 
Sunday-schools and missionary enterprises 
should go on ; in fact, I do not believe he 
ever opposed anything in his life. No one 
was more willing to vote town taxes and 
road repairs and schoolhouses than he. If 
you could call him spirited at all, he was 
public-spirited. 

And with all this he was never very 
well ; he had, from boyhood, " enjoyed poor 
health." You would say he was not a man 
who would ever catch anything, not even an 
epidemic ; but he was a person whom dis- 
eases would be likely to overtake, even the 
slowest of slow fevers. And he was n't a 
man to shake off anything. And yet sick- 
ness seemed to trouble him no more than 
poverty. He was not discontented ; he 
never grumbled. I am not sure but he rel- 
ished a " spell of sickness " in haying-time. 

An admirably balanced man, who accepts 
tht world as it is, and evidently lives on the 
experience of others. I have never seen a 



236 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

man with less envy or more cheerfulness, or 
so contented with as little reason for being 
so. The only drawback to his future is that 
rest beyond the grave will not be much 
change for him, and he has no works to fol- 
low him. 

III. 

This Yankee philosopher, who, without 
being a Brahmin, had, in an uncongenial 
atmosphere, reached the perfect condition of 
Nirvana, reminded us all of the ancient 
sages ; and we queried whether a world that 
could produce such as he, and could, beside, 
lengthen a man's years to one hundred and 
thirteen, could fairly be called an old and 
worn-out world, having long passed the stage 
of its primeval poetry and simplicity. Many 
an Eastern dervish has, I think, got immor- 
tality upon less laziness and resignation than 
this temporary sojourner in Massachusetts. 
It is a common notion that the world (mean- 
ing the people in it) has become tame and 
commonplace, lost its primeval freshness and 
epigrammatic point. Mandeville, in his ar- 
gumentative way, dissents from this entirely. 
He says that the world is more comp^x, 
varied, and a thousand times as interesting 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 237 

as it was in what we call its youth, and that 
it is as fresh, as individual, and capable of 
producing odd and eccentric characters as 
ever. He thought the creative vim had not 
in any degree abated, that both the types of 
men and of nations are as sharply stamped 
and defined as ever they were. 

Was there ever, he said, in the past, any 
figure more clearly cut and freshly minted 
than the Yankee? Had the Old World 
anything to show more positive and uncom- 
promising in all the elements of character 
than the Englishman ? And if the edges of 
these were being rounded off, was there not 
developing in the extreme West a type of 
men different from all preceding, which the 
world could not yet define? He believed 
that the production of original types was 
simply infinite. 

Herbert urged that he must at least admit 
that there was a freshness of legend and 
poetry in what we call the primeval peoples 
that is wanting now; the mythic period is 
gone, at any rate. 

Mandeville could not say about the myths. 
We couldn't tell what interpretation suc- 
ceeding ages would put upon our lives and 
history and literature when they have become 



238 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

remote and shadowy. But we need not go to 
antiquity for epigrammatic wisdom, or for 
characters as racy of the fresh earth as those 
handed down to us from the dawn of history. 
He would put Benjamin Franklin against any 
of the sages of the mythic or the classic pe- 
riod. He would have been perfectly at home 
in ancient Athens, as Socrates would have 
been in modern Boston. There might have 
been more heroic characters at the siege of 
Troy than Abraham Lincoln, but there was 
not one more strongly marked individually ; 
not one his superior in what we call primeval 
craft and humor. He was just the man, if 
he could not have dislodged Priam by a writ 
of ejectment, to have invented the wooden 
horse, and then to have made Paris the hero 
of some ridiculous story that would have set 
all Asia in a roar. 

Mandeville said further that as to poetry, 
he did not know much about that, and there 
was not much he cared to read except parts 
of Shakespeare and Homer and passages of 
Milton. But it did seem to him that we 
had men nowadays who could, if they would 
give their minds to it, manufacture in quan- 
tity the same sort of epigrammatic sayings 
and legends that our scholars were digging 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 239 

out of the Orient. He did not know why 
Emerson in antique setting was not as good 
as Saadi. Take, for instance, said Mande- 
ville, such a legend as this, and how easy it 
would be to make others like it ! — 

The son of an Emir had red hair, of 
which he was ashamed, and wished to dye 
it. But his father said : " Nay, my son, 
rather behave in such a manner that all 
fathers shall wish their sons had red hair." 

This was too absurd. Mandeville had 
gone too far, except in the opinion of Our 
Next Door, who declared that an imitation 
was just as good as an original, if you could 
not detect it. But Herbert said that the 
closer an imitation is to an original, the 
more unendurable it is. But nobody could 
tell exactly why. 

The Fire-Tender said that we are imposed 
on by forms. The nuggets of wisdom that 
are dug out of the Oriental and remote lit- 
eratures would often prove to be only com- 
monplace if stripped of their quaint setting. 
If you give an Oriental twist to some of our 
modern thought, its value would be greatly 
enhanced for many people. 

Lhave seen those, said the Mistress, who 
seem to prefer dried fruit to fresh; but I 



240 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

like the strawberry and the peach of each 
season, and for me the last is always the 
best. 

Even the Parson admitted that there were 
no signs of fatigue or decay in the creative 
energy of the world ; and if it is a question 
of Pagans, he preferred Mandeville to Saadi. 



ELEVENTH STUDY. 

I. 

It happened, or rather, to tell the truth, 
it was contrived, — for I have waited too 
long for things to turn up to have much faith 
in " happen," — that we who have sat by 
this hearthstone before should all be together 
on Christmas Eve. There was a splendid 
backlog of hickory just beginning to burn 
with a glow that promised to grow more 
fiery till long past midnight, which would 
have needed no apology in a loggers' camp, 
— not so much as the religion of which a 
lady (in a city which shall be nameless) 
said, " If you must have a religion, this one 
will do nicely." 

There was not much conversation, as is 
apt to be the case when people come togeth- 
er who have a great deal to say, and are 
intimate enough to permit the freedom of 
silence. It was Mandeville who suggested 
that we read something, and the Young 
Lady, who was in a mood tc enjoy her own 



242 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

thoughts, said, " Do." And finally it came 
about that the Fire-Tender, without more 
resistance to the urging than was becoming, 
went to his library, and returned with a 
manuscript, from which he read the story of 

MY UNCLE IN INDIA. 

Not that it is my uncle, let me explain. 
It is Polly's uncle, as I very well know, from 
the many times she has thrown him up to 
me, and is liable so to do at any moment. 
Having small expectations myself, and hav- 
ing wedded Polly when they were smaller, I 
have come to feel the full force, the crushing 
weight, of her lightest remark about " My 
Uncle in India." The words as I write 
them convey no idea of the tone in which 
they fall upon my ears. I think it is the 
only fault of that estimable woman that she 
has an uncle in India, and does not let him 
quietly remain there. I feel quite sure that 
if I had an uncle in Botany Bay I should 
never, never throw him up to Polly in the 
way mentioned. If there is any jar in our 
quiet life, he is the cause of it ; all along of 
possible " expectations " on the one side cal- 
culated to overawe the other side not having 
expectations. And yet I know that if her 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 243 

uncle in India were this night to roll a bar- 
rel of " India's golden sands," as I feel that 
he any moment may do, into our sitting- 
room, at Polly's feet, that charming wife, 
who is more generous than the month of 
May, and who has no thought but for my 
comfort in two worlds, would straightway 
make it over to me, to have and to hold, if I 
could lift it, forever and forever. And that 
makes it more inexplicable that she, being a 
woman, will continue to mention him in the 
way she does. 

In a large and general way I regard un- 
cles as not out of place in this transitory 
state of existence. They stand for a great 
many possible advantages. They are liable 
to " tip " you at school, they are resources in 
vacation, they come grandly in play about 
the holidays, at which season my heart al- 
ways did warm towards them with lively 
expectations, which were often turned into 
golden solidities ; and then there is always 
the prospect, sad to a sensitive mind, that 
uncles are mortal, and, in their timely taking 
off, may prove as generous in the will as 
they were in the deed. And there is always 
this redeeming possibility in a niggardly 
uncle. Still there must be something wrong 



244 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

in the character of the uncle per se, or all 
history would not agree that nepotism is 
such a dreadful thing. 

But, to return from this unnecessary di- 
gression, I am reminded that the charioteer 
of the patient year has brought round the 
holiday time. It has been a growing year, 
as most years are. It is very pleasant to see 
how the shrubs in our little patch of ground 
widen and thicken and bloom at the right 
time, and to know that the great trees have 
added a layer to their trunks. To be sure, 
our garden — which I planted under Polly's 
directions, with seeds that must have been 
patented, and I forgot to buy the right of, 
for they are mostly still waiting the final 
resurrection — gave evidence that it shared 
in the misfortune of the Fall, and was never 
an Eden from which one would have re- 
quired to be driven. It was the easiest gar- 
den to keep the neighbors' pigs and hens out 
of I ever saw. If its increase was small, 
its temptations were smaller, and that is 
no little recommendation in this world of 
temptations. But, as a general thing, every- 
thing has grown, except our house. That 
little cottage, over which Polly presides with 
grace enough to adorn a palace, is still small 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 245 

outside and smaller inside ; and if it has an 
air of comfort and of neatness, and its rooms 
are cosey and sunny by day and cheerful 
by night, and it is bursting with books, and 
not unattractive with modest pictures on the 
walls, which we think do well enough until 
my uncle — (but never mind my uncle, now) 
— and if, in the long winter evenings, when 
the largest lamp is lit, and the chestnuts 
glow in embers, and the kid turns on the 
spit, and the house-plants are green and flow- 
ering, and the ivy glistens in the firelight, 
and Polly sits with that contented, far-away 
look in her eyes that I like to see, her fin- 
gers busy upon one of those cruel mysteries 
which have delighted the sex since Penelope, 
and I read in one of my fascinating law- 
books, or perhaps regale ourselves with a 
taste of Montaigne, — if all this is true, there 
are times when the cottage seems small ; 
though I can never find that Polly thinks 
so, except when she sometimes says that she 
does not know where she should bestow her 
uncle in it, if he should suddenly come back 
from India. 

There it is, again. I sometimes think 
that my wife believes her uncle in India to 
be as large as two ordinary men ; and if her 



246 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

ideas of him are any gauge of the reality, 
there is no place in the town large enough 
for him except the Town Hall. She proba- 
bly expects him to come with his bungalow, 
and his sedan, and his palanquin, and his 
elephants, and his retinue of servants, and 
his principalities, and his powers, and his 
ha — (no, not that), and his chow-chow, and 
his — I scarcely know what besides. 

Christmas Eve was a shiny cold night, a 
creaking cold night, a placid, calm, swinge- 
ing cold night. Out-doors had gone into a 
general state of crystallization. The snow- 
fields were like the vast Arctic ice-fields that 
Kane looked on, and lay sparkling under 
the moonlight, crisp and Christmasy ; and all 
the crystals on the trees and bushes hung 
glistening, as if ready, at a breath of air, to 
break out into metallic ringing, like a mil- 
lion silver joy-bells. I mentioned the con- 
ceit to Polly, as we stood at the window, and 
she said it reminded her of Jean Paul. She 
is a woman of most remarkable discernment. 

Christmas is a great festival at our house 
in a small way. Among the many delight- 
ful customs we did not inherit from our Pil- 
grim Fathers, there is none so pleasant as 
that of giving presents at this season. It is 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 247 

the most exciting time of the year. No one 
is too rich to receive something, and no one 
too poor to give a trifle. And in the act of 
giving and receiving these tokens of regard, 
all the world is kin for once, and brighter 
for this transient glow of generosity. De- 
lightful custom ! Hard is the lot of child- 
hood that knows nothing of the visits of 
Kriss Kringle, or the stockings hung by the 
chimney at night ; and cheerless is any age 
that is not brightened by some Christmas 
gift, however humble. What a mystery of 
preparation there is in the preceding days, 
what planning and plottings of surprises ! 
Polly and I keep up the custom in our sim- 
ple way, and great is the perplexity to ex- 
press the greatest amount of affection with a 
limited outlay. For the excellence of a gift 
lies in its appropriateness rather than in its 
value. As we stood by the window that 
night, we wondered what we should receive 
this year, and indulged in I know not what 
little hypocrisies and deceptions. 

" I wish," said Polly, " that my uncle in 
India would send me a camel' s-hair shawl, 
or a string of pearls, each as big as the end 
of my thumb." 

"Or a white cow, which would give 



248 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

golden milk, that would make butter worth 
seventy-five cents a pound," I added, as we 
drew the curtains, and turned to our chairs 
before the open fire. 

It is our custom on every Christmas Eve 
— as I believe I have somewhere said, or, if 
I have not, I say it again, as the member 
from Erin might remark — to read one of 
Dickens's Christmas stories. And this night, 
after punching the fire until it sent showers 
of sparks up the chimney, I read the open- 
ing chapter of " Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings," 
in my best manner, and handed the book to 
Polly to continue ; for I do not so much rel- 
ish reading aloud the succeeding stories of 
Mr. Dickens's annual budget, since he wrote 
them, as men go to war in these days, by 
substitute. And Polly read on, in her me- 
lodious voice, which is almost as pleasant to 
me as the Wasser-fluth of Schubert, which 
she often plays at twilight ; and I looked 
into the fire, unconsciously constructing sto- 
ries of my own out of the embers. And her 
voice still went on, in a sort of running ac- 
companiment to my airy or fiery fancies. 

" 'Sleep ? " said Polly, stopping with what 
seemed to me a sort of crash, in which all 
the castles tumbled into ashes. 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 249 

" Not in the least," I answered brightly ; 
" never heard anything more agreeable." 
And the reading flowed on and on and on, 
and I looked steadily into the fire, the fire, 
fire, fi — 

Suddenly the door opened, and into our 
cosey parlor walked the most venerable per- 
sonage I ever laid eyes on, who saluted me 
with great dignity. Summer seemed to have 
burst into the room, and I was conscious of 
a puff of Oriental airs and a delightful, lan- 
guid tranquillity. I was not surprised that 
the figure before me was clad in full turban, 
baggy drawers, and a long loose robe, girt 
about the middle with a rich shawl. Fol- 
lowed him a swart attendant, who hastened 
to spread a rug upon which my visitor sat 
down, with great gravity, as I am informed 
they do in farthest Ind. The slave then 
filled the bowl of a long-stemmed chibouk, 
and, handing it to his master, retired behind 
him and began to fan him with the most 
prodigious palm-leaf I ever saw. Soon the 
fumes of the delicate tobacco of Persia per- 
vaded the room, like some costly aroma 
which you cannot buy, now the entertain- 
ment of the Arabian Kights is discontinued. 

Looking through the window I saw, if I 



250 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

saw anything, a palanquin at our door, and 
attendant on it four dusky, half -naked bear- 
ers, who did not seem to fancy the splendor 
of the night, for they jumped about on the 
snow crust, and I could see them shiver and 
shake in the keen air. Oho ! thought I, this, 
then, is my uncle from India ! 

" Yes, it is," now spoke my visitor extraor- 
dinary, in a gruff, harsh voice. 

" I think I have heard Polly speak of 
you," I rejoined, in an attempt to be civil, 
for I did n't like his face any better than I 
did his voice, — a red, fiery, irascible kind 
of face. 

" Yes, I 've come over to — Oh, Lord ! 
Quick, Jamsetzee 5 lift up that foot, — take 
care. There, Mr. Trimings, if that's your 
name, get me a glass of brandy, stiff." 

I got him our little apothecary-labelled 
bottle, and poured out enough to preserve 
a whole can of peaches. My uncle took 
it down without a wink, as if it had been 
water, and seemed relieved. It was a very 
pleasant uncle to have at our fireside on 
Christmas Eve, I felt. 

At a motion from my uncle, Jamsetzee 
handed me a parcel which I saw was directed 
to Polly, which I untied, and lo ! the most 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 251 

wonderful camel' s-hair shawl that ever was, 
so fine that I immediately drew it through 
my finger-ring, and so large that I saw it 
would entirely cover our little room if I 
spread it out ; a dingy red color, but splen- 
did in appearance from the little white hie- 
roglyphic worked in one corner, which is 
always worn outside, to show that it cost 
nobody knows how many thousands of dol- 
lars. 

"A Christmas trifle for Polly. I have 
come home — as I was saying when that con- 
founded twinge took me — to settle down ; 
and I intend to make Polly my heir, and 
live at my ease and enjoy life. Move that 
leg a little, Jamsetzee." 

I meekly replied that I had no doubt 
Polly would be delighted to see her dear 
uncle, and as for inheriting, if it came to 
that, I did n't know any one with a greater 
capacity for that than she. 

" That depends," said the gruff old smoker, 
"how I like ye. A fortune, scraped up in 
forty years in Ingy, ain't to be thrown away 
in a minute. But what a house this is to 
live in ! " the uncomfortable old relative 
went on, throwing a contemptuous glance 
round the humble cottage. " Is this all of 
it?" 



252 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

" In the winter it is all of it," I said, flush- 
ing up ; " but in the summer, when the doors 
and windows are open, it is as large as any- 
body's house. And," I went on, with some 
warmth, "it was large enough just before 
you came in, and pleasant enough. And be- 
sides," I said, rising into indignation, "you 
cannot get anything much better in this city 
short of eight hundred dollars a year, pay- 
able first days of January, April, July, and 
October, in advance, and my salary " — 

"Hang your salary, and confound your 
impudence and your seven-by-nine hovel! 
Do you think you have anything to say 
about the use of my money, scraped up in 
forty years in Ingy ? Things have got to 
be changed ! " he burst out, in a voice that 
rattled the glasses on the sideboard. 

I should think they were. Even as I 
looked into the little fireplace it enlarged, 
and there was an enormous grate, level with 
the floor, glowing with sea - coal ; and a 
magnificent mantel carved in oak, old and 
brown ; and over it hung a landscape, wide, 
deep, summer in the foreground with all the 
gorgeous coloring of the tropics, and beyond 
hills of blue and far mountains lying in rosy 
light. I held my breath as I looked down 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 253 

the marvellous perspective. Looking round 
for a second, I caught a glimpse of a Hindoo 
at each window, who vanished as if they had 
been whisked off by enchantment ; and the 
close walls that shut us in fled away. Had 
cohesion and gravitation given out? Was 
it the " Great Consummation " of the year 
18 — ? It was all like the swift transfor- 
mation of a dream, and I pinched my arm 
to make sure that I was not the subject of 
some diablerie. 

The little house was gone ; but that I 
scarcely minded, for I had suddenly come 
into possession of my wife's castle in Spain. 
I sat in a spacious, lofty apartment, furnished 
with a princely magnificence. Rare pictures 
adorned the walls, statues looked down from 
deep niches, and over both the dark ivy of 
England ran and drooped in graceful luxu- 
riance. Upon the heavy tables were costly, 
illuminated volumes ; luxurious chairs and 
ottomans invited to easy rest; and upon 
the ceiling Aurora led forth all the flower- 
strewing daughters of the dawn in brilliant 
frescos. Through the open doors my eyes 
wandered into magnificent apartment after 
apartment. There to the south, through 
folding-doors, was the splendid library, with 



254 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

groined roof, colored light streaming in 
through painted windows, high shelves 
stowed with books, old armor hanging on 
the walls, great carved oaken chairs about 
a solid oaken table, and beyond a conserva- 
tory of flowers and plants with a fountain 
springing in the centre, the splashing of 
whose waters I could hear. Through the 
open windows I looked upon a lawn, green 
with close-shaven turf, set with ancient trees, 
and variegated with parterres of summer 
plants in bloom. It was the month of June, 
and the smell of roses was in the air. 

I might have thought it only a freak of 
my fancy, but there by the fireplace sat a 
stout, red-faced, puffy-looking man, in the 
ordinary dress of an English gentleman, 
whom I had no difficulty in recognizing as 
my uncle from India. 

" One wants a fire every day in the year 
in this confounded climate," remarked that 
amiable old person, addressing no one in 
particular. 

I had it on my lips to suggest that I 
trusted the day would come when he would 
have heat enough to satisfy him, in perma- 
nent supply. I wish now that I had. 

I think things had changed. For now 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 255 

into this apartment, full of the morning sun- 
shine, came sweeping with the air of a coun- 
tess born, and a maid of honor bred, and a 
queen in expectancy, my Polly, stepping 
with that lofty grace which I always knew 
she possessed, but which she never had space 
to exhibit in our little cottage, dressed with 
that elegance and richness that I should not 
have deemed possible to the most Dutch 
duchess that ever lived, and, giving me a 
complacent nod of recognition, approached 
her uncle, and said in her smiling, cheery 
way, " How is the dear uncle this morn- 
ing?" And, as she spoke, she actually bent 
down and kissed his horrid old cheek, red- 
hot with currie and brandy and all the biting 
pickles I can neither eat nor name, — kissed 
him, and I did not turn into stone. 

" Comfortable as the weather will permit, 
my darling ! " — and again I did not turn 
into stone. 

" Would n't uncle like to take a drive this 
charming morning ? " Polly asked. 

Uncle finally grunted out his willingness, 
and Polly swept away again to prepare for 
the drive, taking no more notice of me than 
if I had been a poor assistant office lawyer 
on a salary. And soon the carriage was at 



256 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

the door, and my uncle, bundled up like a 
mummy, and the charming Polly drove gayly 
away. 

How pleasant it is to be married rich, I 
thought, as I arose and strolled into the 
library, where everything was elegant and 
prim and neat, with no scraps of paper and 
piles of newspapers or evidences of literary 
slovenness on the table, and no books in at- 
tractive disorder, and where I seemed to see 
the legend staring at me from all the walls, 
" No smoking." So I uneasily lounged out 
of the house. And a magnificent house it 
was, a palace, rather, that seemed to frown 
upon and bully insignificant me with its 
splendor, as I walked away from it towards 
town. 

And why town ? There was no use of 
doing anything at the dingy office. Eight 
hundred dollars a year ! It would n't keep 
Polly in gloves, let alone dressing her for 
one of those fashionable entertainments to 
which we went night after night. And so, 
after a weary day with nothing in it, 1 went 
home to dinner, to find my uncle quite chir- 
ruped up with his drive, and Polly regnant, 
sublimely engrossed in her new world of 
splendor, a dazzling object of admiration to 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 257 

me, but attentive and even tender to that 
hypochondriacal, gouty old subject from 
India. 

Yes, a magnificent dinner, with no end 
of servants, who seemed to know that I 
could n't have paid the wages of one of 
them, and plate and courses endless. I say, 
a miserable dinner, on the edge of which I 
seemed to sit by permission of somebody, 
like an invited poor relation, who wishes he 
had sent a regret, and longing for some of 
those nice little dishes that Polly used to set 
before me with beaming face, in the dear old 
days. 

And after dinner, and proper attention to 
the comfort for the night of our benefactor, 
there was the Blibgims's party. No long, 
confidential interviews, as heretofore, as to 
what she should wear and what I should 
wear, and whether it would do to wear it 
again. And Polly went in one coach, and 
I in another. No crowding into the hired 
hack, with all the delightful care about tum- 
bling dresses, and getting there in good 
order ; and no coming home together to our 
little cosey cottage, in a pleasant, excited 
state of " flutteration," and sitting down to 
talk it all over, and " Was n't it nice ? " and 



258 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

"Did I look as well as anybody? " and " Of 
course you did to me," and all that non- 
sense. We lived in a grand way now, and 
had our separate establishments and sepa- 
rate plans, and I used to think that a real 
separation could n't make matters much dif- 
ferent. Not that Polly meant to be any 
different, or was, at heart ; but, you know, 
she was so much absorbed in her new life of 
splendor, and perhaps I was a little old- 
fashioned. 

I don't wonder at it now, as I look back. 
There was an army of dressmakers to see, 
and a world of shopping to do, and a house- 
ful of servants to manage, and all the after- 
noon for calls, and her dear, dear friend, 
with the artless manners and merry heart of 
a girl, and the dignity and grace of a noble 
woman, — the dear friend who lived in the 
house of the Seven Gables, to consult about 
all manner of important things. I could 
not, upon my honor, see that there was any 
place for me, and I went my own way, not 
that there was much comfort in it. 

And then I would rather have had charge 
of a hospital ward than take care of that 
uncle. Such coddling as he needed, such hu^ 
uioring of whims. And I am bound to say 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 259 

that Polly couldn't have been more dutiful 
to him if he had been a Hindoo idol. She 
read to him and talked to him, and sat by 
him with her embroidery, and was patient 
with his crossness, and wearied herself, that 
I could see, with her devoted ministrations. 
I fancied sometimes she was tired of it, 
and longed for the old homely simplicity. I 
was. Nepotism had no charms for me. 
There was nothing that I could get Polly 
that she had not. I could surprise her with 
no little delicacies or trifles, delightedly 
bought with money saved for the purpose. 
There was no more coming home weary with 
office work, and being met at the door with 
that warm, loving welcome which the King 
of England could not buy. There was no 
long evening when we read alternately from 
some favorite book, or laid our deep house- 
keeping plans, rejoiced in a good bargain or 
made light of a poor one, and were content- 
ed and merry with little. I recalled with 
longing my little den, where in the midst 
of the literary disorder I love, I wrote those 
stories for the " Antarctic " which Polly, if 
nobody else, liked to read. There was no 
comfort for me in my magnificent library. 
We were all rich and in splendor, and our 



260 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

uncle had come from India. I wished, sav- 
ing his soul, that the ship that brought him 
over had foundered off Barnegat Light. It 
would always have been a tender and regret- 
ful memory to both of us. And how sacred 
is the memory of such a loss ! 

Christmas? What delight could I have 
in long solicitude and ingenious devices touch- 
ing a gift for Polly within my means, and 
hitting the border-line between her necessi- 
ties and her extravagant fancy ? A drove 
of white elephants would n't have been good 
enough for her now, if each one carried a 
castle on his back. 

— " and so they were married, and in their 
snug cottage lived happy ever after." — It 
was Polly's voice, as she closed the book. 

" There ! I don't believe you have heard 
a word of it," she said, half complainingly. 

" Oh yes, I have," I cried, starting up and 
giving the fire a jab with the poker ; "I heard 
every word of it, except a few at the close. 
I was thinking" — I stopped, and looked 
found. 

" Why, Polly, where is the camel's - hair 
shawl ? " 

" Camel's-hair fiddlestick ! Now I know 
you have been asleep for an hour." 



BACKLOG STUDIES. 261 

And, sure enough, there was n't any cam- 
ePs-hair shawl there, nor any uncle, nor were 
there any Hindoos at our windows. 

And then I told Polly all about it ; how 
her uncle came back, and we were rich and 
lived in a palace and had no end of money, 
but she did n't seem to have time to love me 
in it all, and all the comfort of the little 
house was blown away as by the winter wind. 
And Polly vowed, half in tears, that she hoped 
her uncle never would come back, and she 
wanted nothing that we had not, and she 
would n't exchange our independent comfort 
and snug house, no, not for anybody's man- 
sion. And then and there we made it all 
up, in a manner too particular for me to men- 
tion ; and I never, to this day, heard Polly 
allude to My Uncle in India. 

And then, as the clock struck eleven, we 
each produced from the place where we had 
hidden them the modest Christmas gifts we 
had prepared for each other, and what sur- 
prise there was ! " Just the thing I needed." 
And " It 's perfectly lovely." And " You 
should n't have done it." And, then, a ques- 
tion I never will answer, " Ten ? fifteen ? 
five ? twelve ? " " My dear, it cost eight 
hundred dollars, for I have put my whole 



262 BACKLOG STUDIES. 

year into it, and I wish it was a thousand 
times better." 

And so, when the great iron tongue of the 
city bell swept over the snow the twelve 
strokes that announced Christmas Day, if 
there was anywhere a happier home than 
ours, I am glad of it ! 



